Pierre Jamet : « Happy Days »

Pierre Jamet, humanist photographer and successful singer, Rolleiflex in hand, lived through the glory days of the Front Populaire. With the encouragement of Léo Lagrange, he founded a youth hostel in Belle-Ile-en-mer, where talented and enthusiastic young people such as Mouloudji, Daniel Fillipachi and Dina Vierny, Aristide Maillol's favorite model, were spending vacations. Pierre Jamet documented this period of freedom, with its revolutionary overtones, with a rare sensitivity that reveals moments of joyful fraternity, punctuated by music. At the end of the First World War, this photographer took part in the emergence of a new way of looking at reality and everyday life, soon followed by Robert Doisneau, Willy Ronis, Georges Martin and, of course, Henri Cartier-Bresson.

From childhood, Pierre Jamet had two passions: singing, which became his main source of income after the Second World War, and photography, which remained his hobby throughout his life.
In the early 30s, a conscientious self-taught photographer, he learned photographic technique from books, and set up his first lab in his bathroom. Later, he moved to a larger studio in the Montparnasse district.
In the pre-war decade, although materially difficult, Pierre Jamet's life was full of varied activities: shipboard radio operator in the merchant navy, dancer in Hans Weidt's ballet company, singer in the choir of the A.E.A.R (Association des Ecrivains et Artistes Révolutionnaires), director of a vacation camp at Belle Île en Mer and, from 1937, active participant in the Auberges de Jeunesse movement which, under the Front Populaire, experienced a major boom. His life stabilized after the war, when he became a member of the vocal quartet "Les Quatre Barbus".
Throughout his eclectic career, his travels, his encounters and his friendships, often involved in the key political events of the twentieth century, Pierre Jamet has photographed in complete freedom to "prolong the ephemeral and save the moment".
His photos exude a contagious joie de vivre, sometimes veiled in a poetic nostalgia.
While Pierre Jamet's extensive body of work places him unquestionably in the category of humanist photographers, it is probably his free-spirited approach that gives his work a breath of fresh air and makes it so original.
During his lifetime, Pierre Jamet never really sought to make his photographic work known beyond a circle of family and friends.
It is thanks to the inventory and distribution carried out since 2009 by his daughter Corinne Jamet that this production has been brought to the attention of the public, who have given the photos an extremely warm welcome.