Andersen Ulf & Boudinet Daniel (ed.), L’écrivain et son portrait, exh. cat., musée des Beaux-Arts de Nancy, (18 September – 19 October 1986), Paris, R. Deforges; Nancy, Presses Universitaires de Nancy, 1986
→Bassouls Sophie, Portraits de la littérature, Lausanne/Paris, P.M. Favre, 1987
→Sophie Bassouls, Écrivains : 550 photographies, Paris, Flammarion, 2001
American Writers in Paris, France Institute/Alliance française, San Fransisco, 2000
→Écrivains hors textes, 666 photos, Bibliothèque historique de la ville de Paris, Paris, 2001
→Chinois de Paris, Town hall of the 10th district, Paris, 6 July–27 August 2016
French photographer.
Sophie Bassouls is known for her photographs of writers and artists. After studying art history, she started work as a photographer and took charge of the photo department of L’Express, then in 1963 that of the Figaro littéraire. Married to Claude Bassouls, she had two children. With him, in 1976, she set up a freelance photojournalism agency called Rush, before joining the Sygma agency in 1986, where she was responsible for literary news. Today she works as a freelance photographer. More than 3,000 portraits bear witness to French and international intellectual and cultural life over the past few decades. Their great beauty stems from her original approach: situating the person in a very specific visual setting (décor, props, light), which helps to express the subject’s deep-seated personality. Her photos have been exhibited in particular in Nancy, Geneva, Bari, Naples, Bologna, New York and San Francisco. In Paris, in 2001, 666 portraits were shown in the Bibliothèque historique de la ville de Paris.
Today, she is creating collages where photographs are a major factor, but cut up, re-painted and put together in fragments surrounded by decorative motifs, with the use of gold leaf; at times the result conjures up Gustav Klimt’s pictures. Her recent works have been exhibited at the La Réserve gallery in Paris (2005), the Des Femmes gallery in Paris (2008), in Naples, and in Istanbul and Ankara (2009).