Paris Under Nazi Occupation by Andre Zucca, 1941

In 2008, 270 photos Andre Zucca took during the Nazi Occupation of Paris was shown collectively to the public for the first time. They were banally pedestrian: velo-taxis waiting for customers, bicyclists, well-dressed citizens strolling along the boulevards and in the parks, commuters in the Metro, crowed cafes, nightclubs and swimming pools full of young fashionable people.

Because Zucca chose to photograph the sunnier side of life in wartime Paris, the exhibition raised the question of just how much Parisians “suffered” during the Occupation and challenged the collective memory reinforced by movies and books: the Paris under the Nazi Occupation was a dreary place, black-and-white hell of hunger, of Nazi round-ups, of torture, humiliation and resistance. Zucca, on the other hand, showed a Paris that got on with life and without great hardship.

Andre Zucca — respected prewar photographer at Paris-Soir and Paris-Match — was working for the German propagandists. He himself was not a Nazi, but he felt no hostility towards the Germans and when his previous employers were shut down, Zucca took a job with the German propaganda magazine Signal, which provided him extremely rare and valuable rolls of Agfacolor film. His assignments were narrowly-defined and difficult but Zucca didn’t stage any of his photos — his casual, carefree, and nonchalant Paris existed: Joseph Goebbels wanted Paris to be “animated and gay” to show off the “new Europe”. Coco Chanel entertained the Nazis; Serge Lifar, Edith Piaf and Herbert von Karajan performed. Theatres, opera houses, nightclubs, cinemas and brothels were kept busy. (Orgy-like parties flourished, right next to the Louvre, and included champagne baths in an era where the most of the world was on food rations).

In Zucca’s photos, the absence of traffic and the presence of swastikas, Nazi uniforms and yellow Stars of David that Jews were forced to wear subtlely suggested thatt everything was not well in the Occupied Europe. No matter what inferences you draw from these photos, this much is certain: while they may not lie, photographs never tell the whole story.

However, none of his colour photographs were ever used during the war, as the Nazis reserved colour printing specially for photos of the war itself. Zucca was arrested after the 1944 liberation but never prosecuted. He worked until his death in 1973 under an assumed name as a wedding photographer in a small town of Paris. In 1974, after this death, his photos were re-published in the Sunday Times magazine (and later in Paris Match).