Library photo exhibition focuses on 'lost generation'

A new exhibition that provides a snapshot of American literati life in Paris between the two world wars will be on view in Firestone Library from Nov. 8 through April 17.

"Portraits of the Lost Generation" focuses chiefly on photographs by Man Ray (1890-1976), the American expatriate artist who moved to Paris in 1921. Also included are portraits of notable American writers and artists by Berenice Abbott, Gisèle Freund, Alfred Harcourt, M. Thérèse Bonney and other photographers active in Paris during the 1920s and '30s.

These photographers and their subjects were drawn to Paris as an avant-garde cultural mecca, open to new ideas and free from censorship. The term "lost generation" was coined by poet Gertrude Stein to refer to the group of expatriates, which included Ernest Hemingway, F. Scott Fitzgerald and Stein herself.

The photographs on exhibition in Firestone Library once lined the walls of Shakespeare & Company, the legendary English-language bookshop founded in Paris by Sylvia Beach (1887-1962). Beach was the daughter of Sylvester Beach, an 1876 Princeton graduate and the minister of Princeton's First Presbyterian Church from 1906 to 1923.

Read the full story in the Weekly Bulletin.