The happy years. Denis photographed by her father Emile Zola

The writer and politically committed intellectual Emile Zola was introduced to photography in 1888, just a he fell in love with Jeanne Rozerot, a linen maid workinf for his wife Alexandrine. He took pictures avidly from 1894, when he had almost completed his major literary project, the Rougon Macquart cycle of novels. 
Of the approximately ten thousand photographs depicting places where he lives (Paris, Médan, Verneuil-sur-Seine, and London where he spent a year in exile in 1898 when he was found guilty of defamation after his brave open letter « J’accuse ! » was published in L’Aurore), sites he visited foreigns towns he explored, friends and servants, and people he met, the most extraordinary and moving of all are the portraits he took of his family. 

Like a personnal diary, his images capture the microcosm of his family, but also the private tragedy of his double life torn between two households and two women. Mirroring the letters he wrote to his « three beloved darlings », his mistress Jeanne and the children she bore him, Denise (born in 1889) and Jacques (born in 1891), with whom he led a secret life, these photographs are passionate declarations of love. 

An extraordinary collaboration developed between this amateur photographer ans his young model at the « large country house surrounded by walls » in Verneuil-sur-Seine, « which was hidden from outside world », described by Denise in the biography wich she published in 1931 entitled Emile Zola par sa fille.
Between his return to France and his death in 1902, Zola took over one hundred portraits of Denis, aged nine to thirteen, photographed indoors, immobile and focused. These differed in style from the sapshots of his children in the garden or on the paths of the property prior to his exile in London (1898-1899).

In a pared back intimate interaction without decor or props, Denise looks down the lens at her loving father who observes her from every angle and in all her finery in head-and-shoulder portraits or in close-up. He becomes the interpreter of the face of a growing child who strikes meditative inscrutable and often solemn poses by turn. These two sad souls are bound by a secret and intense complicity. Photography prompts a silent dialogue between two tender hearts. 

February 3rd - May 29th. Photography cabinet, room 8c

Curator: Marie Robert, Chief Curator of Photography and Film