Untitled

Jacques-André BoiffardWW-1925-140215

1925·Gelatin silver print·28.2 × 22.3 cm (11 1/8 × 8 13/16 in.)

Jacques-André Boiffard was studying medicine in Paris in 1924 when his classmate and childhood friend Pierre Naville introduced him to the founder of surrealism, André Breton. Boiffard was at the heart of the early movement: mentioned by Breton in the first Surrealist Manifesto (1924), he also contributed to the inaugural issue of La Révolution surréaliste the same year, assisted Man Ray in his studio, and took pictures of Paris to illustrate Breton’s book Nadja in 1928. He caught the attention of collector and dealer Julien Levy, who purchased three of Boiffard’s photographs in 1931 and included him—with Eugène Atget, Man Ray, László Moholy-Nagy, Salvador Dalí, and Pablo Picasso, among others—in his gallery exhibition Surréalisme in January 1932. This photograph of two giraffes with anthropomorphic yet alien features must have appealed to Levy and other aficionados of Surrealism, who had a fascination with animal forms.

Catalogue

Year: 1925
Medium: Gelatin silver print
Dimensions: 28.2 × 22.3 cm (11 1/8 × 8 13/16 in.)
Collection: Art Institute of Chicago
Artist: Jacques-André Boiffard

Artist

Jacques-André Boiffard

Photography

Jacques-André Boiffard was a French photographer and filmmaker active from the 1920s through the postwar period. He worked across documentary, experimental, and surrealist modes, collaborating with key figures in the avant-garde and producing images that ranged from intimate portraiture to architectural and bodily studies. His practice bridged photography's early modernist experiments with postwar reassessment of the medium's documentary and aesthetic capacities.

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