Laure Albin Guillot acted as a bridge between two generations of artists: the pictorialists, who wanted to correlate photography with painting, and, as from the 1920s, the Nouvelle Vision movement, a group of modern-minded photographers.

The artist’s work on nudes shows how cleverly she transitioned from a pictorialist to a modern aesthetics. While she photographed female nudes in classical poses and compositions in the early 1920s, her work saw a formal evolution in its use of whites and framing between 1927 and 1934. She was also one of the few photographers of the 1930s to approach male nudes beyond the domains of sport and allegory. At the exhibition Portraits d’hommes [Male Portraits], (Billiet-Vorms Gallery, Paris, 1935), she presented audacious male nudes alongside classic portraits.

text adapted from: From the Dictionnaire universel des créatrices (retrieved from: AWARE archives of women artists)