Pierre Verger
THE GO-BETWEEN

MONOGRAPHY – PHOTOGRAPHS FROM THE WORLD (1932-1962)

AFRICA, CARIBBEAN, BRAZIL, SOUTH AMERICA, USA, ASIA, OCEANIA, EUROPE

Pierre Verger is certainly the most human photographer loving world. A respectful and tender glance from a still virgin time. A rediscovery of the photographer Pierre Verger, before his revival in Fatumbi (initiated in Vodoo worship). In 1932, at the age of thirty, Pierre Verger decided to leave everything and travel, devoting himself to photography. He was to become one of the great photographers of this time, publishing photographs of peoples all over the world.

His vision of Humanity transcends all traditions and all differences. Driven by this same curiosity and love of the world he also became one of the first to research into Vodoo and the history of the negro slave trade between Africa and Americas. The 210 photographs presented in this book tell the sensitive and moving tale of a great talent still today unknown. He attends George-Henri Rivière, Michel Leiris (who open him the African world to the Ethnographic Trocadero Museum in Paris as the evenings of “Negro Dance”), the “Jacques Prévert band”, and humaniste photographers of the time (Zuber, Boucher, Feher, Bellon then Capa with whom he founds the agency Alliance Photo)…

See also the book 'DIEUX D'AFRIQUE' (GODS AFRICA) By PIERRE VERGER

(Essay and photographs about African Yoruba and Brazilian Orisha cults)

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… He works for teh newpapers Paris-Soir, Daily Mirror, Paris Match, Paul Hartmann publisher. His view of humanity transcends all folklore and differences.

Turned off by the horror of the Sino-Japanese war where he photographs for the agency Alliance Photo, and the position of voyeurism as a press photographer, he gives up this type of photography and continues to travel freely without any purpose other than meeting with others. From continent to continent, from Africa to Americas, he met Alfred Metraux, Roger Bastide...

In 1948, Theodore Monod (then director of IFAN Dakar) requires him to write notes next to his photographs. He becomes thus researcher on the Yoruba worship in Africa and Brazil (cf “Gods of Africa” Revue Noire editions) and later member of CNRS (scientific research centre). this allows him to finally live more easily. But, according to him, he loses the “spontaneousness of its glance on the world”. He then gradually gives up photography, its "active unconscious" that he rediscovers in preparing this book, made at our request, of loving photographs of others.

Editors Jean Loup Pivin, Pascal Martin Saint Leon
214 photographs by Pierre Verger, taken through all the world

Biography writing by Jean Loup Pivin

Hardcover book of 236 B&W pages 24×32 cm

Published in 1993

In French and English

ISBN 2 909571 041

Few pages from the book 'Pierre VerGer, The Go-Between' :

[run the slideshow below]