It was in 1946 that Édouard Boubat (1923-1999) was initiated to photography and met Lella, the muse with her free-flowing hair, who was to become his first wife (1). Boubat's work, a testimony of post-war France, is often qualified as "humanistic". While he crisscrossed Paris, taking awestruck images of children and couples, he also travelled the world and between 1951 and 2967 produced photographic accounts on topical subjects for the magazine Réalités. Boubat, "photographer of women" in the words of Bernard Plossu, never stopped capturing the beauty of women, his favourite models, whom he photographed with modesty and sincerity.
From Man Ray to Willy Ronis, the dark room has often revealed the attractions of women's hair. Throughout his work, Boubat explored this plastic and poetic motif which he exalted delicately in this black and white snapshot of Lella seated on the grass. Her hair lifted by the wind passes like a veil in front of her face and, in the centre of the composition, irresistibly attracts the gaze. The cascade of wisps of hair conceals and becomes the object of desire. Dissimulated under the heavy curtain of hair, the Muse is all the more attractive. A certain strangeness then emanates, reminiscent of surrealistic photographs or paintings where the shock of hair, a veritable fetiche, sometimes becomes a mask. But here, the soft light which bathes the scene and the breeze which lifts the model's hair are the promise of an unveiling to come.
Boubat captures the fleeting moment when the long hair flies freely and sensually while Lella, docile in her white dress, stays quiet. The photographer's amorous eye seizes and immortalises this eroticism of the moment when nature suddenly becomes the accomplice of desire. In a setting of greenery, like in a Renoir painting, the air and light sculpt the almost abstract substance of the young woman's silky curls. In the sun, her hair takes on light reflections and invites the caresses that only the wind is allowed... In the intimacy of this snapshot, Boubat's gaze embraces his beloved, whose tangled hair reveals a sensual and wild, even untameable nature, which Brigitte Bardot would embody openly a few years later.
(1) In 1947, a portrait of Lella, her long wavy hair streaming in the wind on a ship off the Isle of Groix, won Boubat first prize at the 2nd National Salon of Photography. An exhibition ("Lella") at the Maison européenne de la photographie, in 1999 and other works were devoted to portraits of Lella.
