A human’s face can express 10,000 emotions in mere seconds. A tight-lipped smile, the tilt of one’s head to demonstrate superiority, the forlorn expression after a lover’s quarrel; for eons, artists have worked tirelessly to capture these fleeting moments. Sometimes, the artwork unveils a new side of the individual in front of the creator; other times, it makes one ponder the sitter’s thoughts and intentions. Leonardo da Vinci’s Mona Lisa is an example of the latter. Her enigmatic smile propels the viewer to theorize and debate its meaning even today. But with a medium like photography, the expressions become more pronounced, opening myriad doors to interpretation. An artist whose name may not be known to many sets an excellent example of how photography can capture the most intense forms of one’s essence: Thérèse Le Prat.
The lead image of Thérèse Le Prat’s photo books is the courtesy of Burman Rare Books.
Every continent has some exceptional photographers every millennium; however, some whose names and works never truly reach the annals as they should. Thérèse Le Prat is a photographer whose images are only known to those who have cared enough to look. Born in 1895, Le Prat, also called Cahen, was raised with art. Her family, residing in Patin, a commune in France, ensured she learned literature, languages, drawing, and instruments such as the violin. While there is not much information about her early life, the story of her vast career begins following her divorce from her husband, Guy Le Prat, in 1930, to whom she was married briefly. While Thérèse Le Prat was very good at drawing, her fascination with photography never seized. Upon their separation, Guy, who owned a Rolleiflex, gifted it to his former wife. Although the intention of such a move is still mysterious, many believe it could to help her earn a living.
After this chapter was sealed, a new one arrived. Le Prat, who was exceptionally talented, began working as a reporter for Compagnie des Messageries Maritimes, a French merchant shipping company that allowed her to travel to the far-flung lands of Asia, Africa, and Oceania. During one such professional visit to Cambodia, Asia, Le Pret met Gilberte de Coral-Rémusat, an independent archaeologist and art historian, who was friends with Philippe Stern, an art historian. De Coral-Rémusat and Stern were working together, and this relationship led Le Prat to meet the esteemed chronicler. Both became fond of each other and after World War II, they tied the knot.
Stern was a man of many talents, and one of them was his keen interest in portrait photography. Although it remains unclear how Le Prat began to document portraits, some indirectly hint at Stern’s involvement with artists of his time. Le Prat initially started to take photographs of children but gradually moved to capturing artistic, literary, and scientific personalities. In 1947, when she was working as a theatre stage photographer, Le Prat’s fascination with feelings and emotions took its root. Her initial work saw her capturing portraits in her studio of theatre artists set against a black backdrop. The close-ups were composed to include only the face and the shoulder or would also include their hands and torso. Her reasoning for this was again her inclination to what inspired her. However, one thing that remained constant was her use of masks and makeup, with the actors often dressed in black. In essence, Le Prat was not making portraits of actors in costumes but rather capturing the expressions of a few lines the actor said during the play and, for instance, recreating a picture of actor Jean-Louis Barrault, where he expresses the weight of Hamlet’s soliloquy “to be or not to be,” with his sentiments. While these images were published in theatre magazines such as L’Avant-Scène or Théâtre de France, they become a part of her book portolio: Visages d’acteurs in 1950, and Autres visages d’acteurs in 1952.
“There are masks made of straw or cardboard, animated by a tensed body of drooping shoulders, semi-masks of hardened paint, which by their inevitable immobility give the face a bitter yet serene greatness,” wrote Le Prat about her series. “The eyes alone live and entreat; some masks are solemn, others tender or grimacing…and then there are faces without paint where the very intensity of expression forms the mask.”
But Thérèse Le Prat’s vision for her portraits was increasingly transformed as time passed. In her other two publications, 1955’s Masques et Destins and 1959’s Le Masque et l’humain, Le Prat chose a sombre look. The costumes became a thing of the past, with the photographer choosing simple drapes to highlight the varied human expressions and the use of the hands. Here, her works’ theme was mainly inspired by the Far East, Africa, Japanese theatrical traditions, Jewish theater, and German theater. In 1964, she published 42 photographs of mime Wolfram Mehring in Un seul visage en ses métamorphoses to reveal the possibilities of how much a face can contort to showcase the person’s emotions. For this series, she worked with make-up artist Grillon to accentuate the face in varied forms.
Two years later, in 1966, Thérèse Le Prat passed away, leaving a legacy of thousands of photographs and an exciting approach to portrait photography of actors, in which their humanness became the focus rather than their larger-than-life personalities.