Bookshelf

Yves Debraine : De Cocteau à Simenon. Portraits d’écrivains. Éditions Noir sur Blanc, Lausanne

125 photos en noir et blanc. 208 pages • 29 Euros • 34,80 CHF

Photographe franco-suisse, dont nous fêtons cette année le centenaire de la naissance, Yves Debraine a collaboré aux plus grands titres de la presse suisse et internationale. Signe de son goût pour la littérature, ses archives contiennent de nombreux portraits d’écrivains de toutes nationalités. Photographe personnel de Charlie Chaplin, Yves Debraine a aussi été celui de Georges Simenon. Cette relation privilégiée lui a permis de documenter une rencontre unique entre le père de Maigret et celui de James Bond, Ian Fleming. Quant à lui, Jean Giono admirait le talent du photographe au point de lui consacrer plusieurs pages dans les Notes sur l’affaire Dominici.

Jean Cocteau, Vladimir Nabokov, Albert Cohen, John Le Carré, Friedrich Dürrenmatt, Ella Maillart ou Jacques Chessex appréciaient poser pour Yves Debraine qui, selon les mots de Simenon, « opérait sans douleur ». Les images en noir et blanc, prises entre 1950 et 1990, dévoilent un photographe attentif à l’acte d’écrire, à la chorégraphie des mains et des mots, à la dynamique des corps dans leurs lieux de création.

 D’origine française, installé en Suisse dès 1948, Yves Debraine (1925-2011) s’est vite imposé comme un talentueux reporter-photographe. Il a collaboré pendant des décennies à la presse magazine suisse et internationale, dont les publications du groupe Time-Life aux États-Unis. Il a créé plusieurs agences et titres de presse. Il a été le photographe attitré de Charlie Chaplin, ainsi que de l’écrivain Georges Simenon et de la famille de savants-aventuriers Piccard.

Journaliste et commissaire d’expositions, Luc Debraine gère les vastes archives photographique de son père. Il a travaillé en Suisse romande pour Le Nouveau Quotidien et Le Temps, ainsi que pour le magazine L’Hebdo.

About the author

Nadia Sikorsky

Nadia Sikorsky was born and raised in Moscow. She graduated from the Faculty of Journalism at Moscow State University and went on to complete her postgraduate studies there, earning a PhD in History. She spent 13 years at UNESCO, first in Paris and then in Geneva. After serving as Director of Communications at Green Cross International, founded by Mikhail Gorbachev, she launched NashaGazeta.ch in 2007, Switzerland’s first Russian-language online daily newspaper.

In 2022, Nadia Sikorsky was named to Le Temps’ Forum des 100, which brings together individuals who, in the newspaper’s view, have “significantly contributed to the success of French-speaking Switzerland”, from across public life, business, politics, science and culture.

After 18 years at the helm of NashaGazeta.ch, Nadia Sikorsky decided to devote herself to what had always held a special place in her work as a journalist: culture in all its diversity. This led to the creation of Russian Accent, a trilingual cultural blog in Russian, French and English, born in the heart of Europe, in Switzerland, which has become her second home and whose multiculturalism and multilingualism have helped shape the character of this new project.

At the heart of the project is the perspective of a European of Russian origin, drawing on more than 35 years of professional experience and a deep knowledge of both cultural traditions. Nadia Sikorsky sees her role as that of a cultural mediator between the two. The title of the blog, Russian Accent, reflects this idea: the accent is neither a linguistic barrier nor a political position, but a distinctive cultural imprint within a European context.

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