Nicolas Yantchevsky

1924 — 1972

Nicolas Yantchevsky was a French street photographer. Yantchevsky, whose father had been a stage director in the ballet, initially followed suit by working as a lighting technician in theater. Across his career, photography was rarely his primary pursuit. Yantchevsky shot on a Rolleiflex, and throughout the fifties was commissioned to take photographs for the sleeve art of some twenty-eight detective novels published by Presses de la Cité.

Unlike the vast majority of his Parisian contemporaries, he never belonged to a photographic collective like Le Groupe des XV. Paris as seen through Yantchevsky's lens is shadowy, atmospheric, an after-dark chiarascuro — in some ways displaying the influence of Brassaï's similarly nocturnal portraits of the city. From 1958, Yantchevsky became a novelist himself, largely abandoning photography. He died in 1972, having gained little fame during his lifetime in photographic circles.