In the winter of 1924, Casimir Zagourski embarked for Leopoldville to settle permanently. He left behind his titles of nobility and a brilliant career in the imperial armament to become the portraitist of the African continent. Zagourski was celebrating his fourteenth birthday and, seeking the a total escape and the adventure, he chose to follow the expeditions that went up and down the plains until the sources of the Nile. He moved to the Congo's capital and opened a photography studio and a development laboratory.
Already conscious of living the last moments of an Africa spared by modernity, he documents peoples and their customs. Scenes of everyday life, architectural elements, costumes, panoramas are photographed according to a serial method, repetition and accumulation becoming, under the objective of Zagourski, an artistic gesture. Beauty is everywhere: in hairstyles, in nature, in bodies and in looks. The photographs are divided into two carefully inventoried series.
Lot 515 - Casimir Zagourski (1883-1944)
Rwanda. The "Queen Mother"
Estimate 4 000 - 6 000 €
Zagourski very quickly understands the need to commercialize his work himself. He gathers his images in prestigious albums entitled “Africa that disappears”, declined in very limited numbers and all different, the cover decorated with an elephant head embossed leather. Alongside these prestigious works, Zagourski draws his photographs in small format for amateurs. Faced with the success of these easy-to-collect photographs, he again uses small-format complete series on silver paper and adds a postcard back to them. His photographs were ready to travel around the world.
Surrounded by tones and shapes, Zagourski decided to compose some of his landscapes and portraits as a 17th century painter. It departs from the frontal and objective representation of the ethnologist to capture chiaroscuro, impenetrable faces, eyes veiled by memory. These photographs make his reputation in Europe. The Belgian authorities present sixty of these "picture-paintings" in the Belgian Congo Pavilion at the Paris International Exhibition of 1937; Zagourski then prints them on a photographic velvet paper of exceptional quality, which brings grain and mellowness to each shot.
When in 1939 World War II breaks out, Casimir Zagourski is in Poland. Citizen of a nation invaded by Germany and Russia, he succeeds the following year to reach Belgium then travels through Europe before returning to Africa. Sick, he died in 1944 in Leopoldville, leaving behind a celebrated artwork.
This collection is exceptional both in its scale and the pieces that are presented, it is the memory of a dream Africa, the images of a world gone.
