Louis Eugène Pirou (26 September 1841 – 30 September 1909) was a French photographer and

filmmaker Filmmaking or film production is the process by which a Film, motion picture is produced. Filmmaking involves a number of complex and discrete stages, beginning with an initial story, idea, or commission. Production then continues through screen ...

, known primarily for his portraits of celebrities and scenes from the

Paris Commune The Paris Commune (, ) was a French revolutionary government that seized power in Paris on 18 March 1871 and controlled parts of the city until 28 May 1871. During the Franco-Prussian War of 1870–71, the French National Guard (France), Nation ...

. He was awarded a gold medal at the Exposition Universelle of 1889.

Life and work

He owned numerous studios in Paris, mostly on the

Boulevard Saint-Germain The Boulevard Saint-Germain () is a major street in Paris on the Rive Gauche of the Seine. It curves in a 3.5-kilometre (2.1 miles) arc from the Pont de Sully in the east (the bridge at the edge of Île Saint-Louis) to the Pont de la Concord ...

, but he also operated one at an old evangelical mission on the Rue Royale. That one was sold to a photographer named Arthur Herbert, in 1889, with permission to use Pirou's name. In 1898, Herbert sold the studio to the brothers Georges and Oscar Mascré (1865-1943), who continued to use Pirou's name without his permission. Pirou lost a complicated lawsuit against the brothers, who compounded the fraud by referring to the studio as "Otto-Pirou", in reference to Otto Wegener, a Swedish-born photographer who was also not associated with them.Camille Blot-Wellens, "Eugène Pirou, portraitiste de la Belle Époque", in ''Revue de la Bibliothèque nationale de France'' #50, 24 September 2015, . During the Exposition of 1889, he saw a presentation of

chronophotography Chronophotography is a photographic technique from the Victorian era which captures a number of phases of movements. The best known chronophotography works were mostly intended for the scientific study of Animal locomotion, locomotion, to discov ...

, given by its inventor, Étienne-Jules Marey. Not long after, he decided to pursue the new art of

cinematography Cinematography () is the art of motion picture (and more recently, electronic video camera) photography. Cinematographers use a lens (optics), lens to focus reflected light from objects into a real image that is transferred to some image sen ...

. He bought the necessary equipment in the summer of 1896 and, together with his employee, Albert Kirchner, who would later become a noted filmmaker in his own right, he filmed scenes of assorted events in Paris and showed them at the "Cinématographe Eugène Pirou" in the basement of the Café de la Paix at the Place de l'Opéra, with a projector designed by Henri Joly. He and Kirchner later produced one of the first known erotic films, (generally called ''Bedtime for the Bride'' in English), starring an actress who went by the name . It was mostly a striptease. He also produced a short film about the Parisian visit of Tsar Nicolas II in 1896. He was married twice. His first wife died in 1881 and his second in 1899.''

Le Figaro () is a French daily morning newspaper founded in 1826. It was named after Figaro, a character in several plays by polymath Pierre Beaumarchais, Beaumarchais (1732–1799): ''Le Barbier de Séville'', ''The Guilty Mother, La Mère coupable'', ...

'', 8 janvier 1899, page
Online
@ ''Gallica''

References

External links

@ '' Who's Who of Victorian Cinema''
List of works
@

IMDb IMDb, historically known as the Internet Movie Database, is an online database of information related to films, television series, podcasts, home videos, video games, and streaming content online – including cast, production crew and biograp ...

{{DEFAULTSORT:Pirou, Eugene 1841 births 1909 deaths French photographers