Lucien Hervé

The photographer Lucien Hervé was born in 1910 in Hungary and moved to Paris in 1929. A man committed to the Resistance, he became close to the post-war French Humanist school, alongside Robert Doisneau and Willy Ronis. His career truly took off in 1949 when he became Le Corbusier’s official photographer.

His architectural photographs, images of major Parisian construction sites, and the pictures of his Paris apartment from the series Paris Without Leaving My Window highlight high-angle compositions, oblique viewpoints, economy of means, and a desire for abstraction—elements that define his work and set him apart from his contemporaries. After receiving several distinctions—Chevalier of the Legion of Honour (1992), Chevalier of Arts and Letters (1994), and the Grand Prize for Photography of the City of Paris (2000)—he passed away in 2007 at the age of 96.