1914 – 2005
Théodore Brauner, born March 20, 1914 in Vienna (Austria) and died March 7, 2000 in Paris, is a photographer and designer of Romanian origin. He is the youngest brother of the surrealist painter Victor Brauner. Shortly after his birth, his family, of Romanian origin, returned to Romania and then joined the capital Bucharest in 1918. At the age of 13, he founded the magazine FIUNK with friends. In 1929, he joined the magazine Alge (Alge. Revista de Arta Moderna, edited by the poet Aureliù Baranga, appeared in 7 issues between 1930 and 1931; three issues followed in 1933.) in which Paul Paùn and Gherasim Luca were active. Passionate about photography and very aware of the artistic avant-garde, in 1934 he developed the Solarfix, a new technique of photogram made with direct sunlight and without a camera. In 1942, he fled Romania on a boat with a small group of refugees and, after a six-month journey, reached Beirut where he was arrested by the English. He was then deported to Cyprus where he was interned for two years. He joined Tel Aviv in 1944 (Palestine). He produced press reports to earn his living from 1945 and became close to Robert Capa but continued his work on the Solarfix. In 1952, they were grouped together and exhibited under the title Saturnalia at the Beth Haomanim Museum (House of Artists) in Jerusalem. The same year, he stayed in Paris and took photos of the surrealist group. In 1954, he began the story that would be published much later in 1962 under the title of Silent Visitor, a personal illustrated account of a kleptomaniac bat. In order to provoke clichés, he even designed a mechanism by which the animal itself triggers the shots of its crimes. In 1956, he settled permanently in Paris and began the famous series of Masks, anthropomorphic photographs, in which he systematically sought to identify, by giving them a poetic existence, the objects that surround us. In 1964 he made his last Masks; worked as a photographer for the Odéon Theater in Paris. In the early 1980s, he experimented with photography with a photocopier. He died on March 7 and is buried in Fontenay-aux Roses.
