Photography: In 1946, having returned to Paris after two years of compulsory labour in a factory in Leipzig, Édouard Boubat sold a six-volume dictionary to fund the purchase of his first camera, a 6x6 Rolleicord.
He took his first professional photograph in the Jardin du Luxembourg, Little Girl with Dead Leaves, a charming and magical snapshot which might be an image out of A Midsummer Night's Dream. It was a remarkable start to a remarkable career. The following year, at the age of 24, Boubat exhibited the picture at the Salon International de la Photographie organised by the Bibliothèque Nationale de France, and was awarded the Kodak Prize.
Boubat, the son of an army chef, was a natural photographer, with a gift for capturing those moments of pure happiness which, however rare and fleeting, can seem to define the very essence of life. In the same year that he bought the Rolleicord he met his future wife, Lella, of whom he took some of the most beautiful and emblematic photographs of the 20th century. The famous study of her with her friend, Séguis, taken on board ship off the coast of the Île de Groix in Brittany, is beautifully characterised in a quotation from Lella herself quoted in Boubat:
What I think, to quote Proust . . . is that it is charged with something of the "transparent substance of our best moments", those that we shared while we were young, Boubat, Séguis and I, before the course of our life made us drift apart, caught up in the spell that we were living under back then, and what can only be called a poetic adventure.
Boubat's work is often compared to that of Robert Doisneau, with whom he shared another Bibliothèque Nationale prize in 1949. However, there is something slightly suspect about the sweetness and humour of Doisneau's work - it seems some, at least, of his "impromptu" street scenes were posed, including the famous shot of a pair of lovers obliviously kissing in a crowded Paris street. Boubat's photographs, for all their lush sensuality, have a hardness to them that is the mark of the true artist's unrelenting gaze. As the novelist Marguerite Duras asks, in another of the book's apt quotes: "If our eyes could see the way that Boubat's photography sees, would they be able to stand it?"
Boubat, co-edited by the photographer's son and assistant, is another triumph of the book-maker's art from Thames & Hudson, a definitive collection, surely, of this wonderful photographer's work. There may be a few too many of Boubat's own gnomic aperçus of the "And from every sensation, an eternal moment springs" variety, but they are only a mild distraction from the ravishing pictures. At £45, a very reasonable price for such a treasury of images, Boubat is one of the season's best bargains.
John Banville's new novel, The Sea, will be published next year by Picador.
Édouard Boubat. Compiled and edited by Bernard Boubat and Geneviève Anhoury Thames & Hudson, 365pp. £45