5		 Photographer Edouard Boubat just died in Paris early this July. I especially remember his hands, those of a piano-player or a midwife with which he liked to draw circles in the air. He had a way of addressing himself to a single person as if to a crowd, calling him or her "my children" (mes enfants).  
  Edouard Boubat, from Anges

   
 

Boubat traveled the world over since the 1950s and was part of a group of humanistic photographers that emerged after World War II: they detested violence and concentrated on life's most positive aspects. Now that Doisneau, Izis and Boubat have died, only Willy Ronis survives of that gentle group.

I especially remember now that poet Jacques Prévert has given Edouard Boubat the title: "Peace Correspondent." Some, but not enough, of Boubat's books are available in the US: Edouard Boubat, by Bernard George and Woman. On your next trip to France, look in the book bins near the Seine river, or at the bookstore La Chambre Claire, rue Saint Sulpice, for a slight volume called Anges(Angels): on its cover there's a child wearing a fur-lined regal coat and a pair of butterfly-like wings. As in many of Boubat's pictures, he is seen from the back.

 
 
  Jacques Prévert, by Edouard Boubat
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