Departures of note

In June 1907, Léon Gimpel became the first photographer to have color images published, when a special edition of the magazine L'Illustration featured four of his autochrome plates: a group of soldiers, two views of Villefranche-sur-Mer, and a sunset at Lake Geneva. Weeks later, on 29 June 1907, he published the first color news photographs, capturing King Frederik VIII of Denmark and his wife Louise during their visit to France. Gimpel had met Auguste and Louis Lumière in 1904, shortly after they displayed their autochrome process to the Académie des Sciences, and he worked with his colleague Fernand Monpillard to modify the plates, reducing the long exposure time to produce what were called 'instant' color pictures. Through this work, he became the only photographer to record scenes of everyday life in color during the Belle Époque.

Born in Strasbourg in 1873, Gimpel was the youngest of four sons in a Jewish Alsatian family that fled to Paris after Germany took over Alsace in 1870. He worked for his family's fabric company, managed by his older brother Eugene, until his interest in photography was kindled in 1897 when he acquired a Kodak detective camera. He soon traded it for a Spido Gaumont, which gave him greater creative freedom, and by 1900 he was documenting the Paris World's Fair. His work appeared regularly in magazines such as La Vie au Grand Air, La Vie Illustrée, and L'Illustration from 1904 onward. A restless experimenter, he played with perspective, produced self-portraits using distorting mirrors, and tried night photography. In August 1909, at an air show at Béthény, he ascended in a balloon to photograph the crowds below, pioneering aerial photography.

During the First World War, Gimpel produced his most famous autochrome images, known as The Grenata Street Army. He befriended a group of children from the Grenata Street neighborhood of Paris who had established their own 'army,' and under his guidance they built tanks and aircraft while he documented their mock battles against the 'boche.' He also recorded the French experience of the war more seriously, visiting munitions factories and the trenches on the Western Front. Gimpel married Marguerite Bouillon in 1939 and settled in Béarn, where he died in 1948 at Sévignacq-Meyracq. Though largely forgotten for decades, his work saw a revival in the 2000s: the band Beirut used one of his photographs as inspiration for their 2007 album The Flying Club Cup, a major retrospective took place at the Musée d'Orsay in Paris in February 2008, and his images influenced the 2009 Spike Jonze film Where the Wild Things Are.