René Le Bègue

Nationality

French

Lifetime

1857-1914

Biography

René Le Bègue French, 1857-1914 René Le Bègue was an amateur photographer in Paris who specialized in studies of women, especially nudes. His work, done principally in the gum bichromate process, had an artistic orientation. Amateurs, he wrote, through "personal intervention" in their prints, could lift photography toward art, overcoming the "mechanical and servile" way in which the lens copies nature. Le Bègue's images were widely published and shown. He was a founder of the Photo Club of Paris, participating in its first exhibition, and was the first French photographer admitted to the Linked Ring. Le Bègue frequently worked with his uncle, Paul Bergon (1863-1912), and their careers are closely intertwined. He also worked with Constant Puyo and Robert Demachy, other exponents of an artistic approach to photography. It is believed that Le Bègue stopped photographing upon the death of Bergon. His work was introduced to the United States in a 1906 group exhibition at the Little Galleries of the Photo-Secession in New York, and through publication of two of his photographs in Camera Work that same year. T.W.F.

Artworks

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Camera Work

A. Horsley Hinton

Alfred Stieglitz

Alice M. Boughton

Alvin Langdon Coburn

Anne W. Brigman

Arthur Allen Lewis

Arthur Radclyffe Dugmore

Baron Adolph de Meyer

C. Yarnall Abbott

Clarence H. White

David Octavius Hill

E.M. Bane

Edward Steichen

Ema Spencer

Eva Watson-Schutze

F. Benedict Herzog

Francis Bruguière

Frank Eugene

Frederick H. Evans

Frederick H. Pratt

George Davison

George Bernard Shaw

George H. Seeley

Gertrude Käsebier

Guido Rey

Hans Watzek

Harold Mortimer-Lamb

Harry Rubincam

Heinrich Kuehn

Herbert G. French

Hugo Henneberg

J. Craig Annan

John Francis Strauss

Joseph T. Keiley

Julia Margaret Cameron

Karl F. Struss

Marshall R. Kernochan

Oskar Hofmeister

Paul Strand

Paul B. Haviland

Prescott Adamson

René Le Bègue

Robert Adamson

Robert Demachy

Sarah C. Sears

Theodor Hofmeister

W.W. Renwick

William B. Dyer

William B. Post

William E. Wilmerding