In the Paris of the Roaring Twenties, two brothers from Moravia built one of the most distinctive erotic photography studios of their time. Their images combined beauty, theatre, fetishism and games of power, while their models, among them Lucette Desmoulins, embodied a changing attitude towards the body and desire. Then the war came. In 1942, Jacques and Charles Biederer were arrested, interned at Pithiviers and deported to Auschwitz, where they were murdered. Their photographs survived.
Nearly a century after they were made, the photographs of Jacques and Charles Biederer still have an unsettling freshness. Their world of corsets, stockings, theatrical poses and carefully staged games of desire belongs unmistakably to 1920s and 1930s Paris, yet something in the images remains remarkably contemporary. Perhaps it is the confidence of the women, the sophistication of the compositions, or simply the way the brothers understood that desire could be photographed as theatre, with its own characters, rituals and visual language.
That is what sets the Biederer brothers apart from much of the commercial erotic photography of their time. They did not simply photograph naked bodies. They invented situations, assigned roles and created characters. Their studio became a small theatre in which desire could change costume, status and, at times, the balance of power itself. A woman could be dominant, submissive, elegant, provocative or mysterious; a man could become a spectator, accomplice or victim. Fantasy was not merely photographed. It was staged.
Behind the name that has since become synonymous with this particular corner of photographic history were two brothers whose own lives have remained largely in the shadow of their images. Jacques Biederer was born on April 27, 1887, in Moravská Ostrava, then part of the Austro-Hungarian Empire, and came to France in 1908. His younger brother Charles, born in 1892, joined him a few years later. Together they would make photography their profession and eventually establish themselves in Paris, where their collaboration gave rise to the Biederer Studio and the Ostra publishing house.
Much of their early life remains obscure. By 1921, however, the brothers were already listed as photographers in Béziers, at 17 avenue Louis-Gallet. They remained there in the professional directories until 1925 before returning to Paris. It was in the capital that their work would take on a new dimension, within a world where photography, theatre, fashion, lingerie, entertainment and eroticism were far more closely intertwined than we might imagine today.
The Studio on Boulevard du Temple
Their Paris studio was located at 33 boulevard du Temple, in a district where the worlds of entertainment and photography overlapped with cafés, theatres, small businesses and the city’s thriving nightlife. It was here that the brothers developed a visual language that would gradually become unmistakably their own.
Their starting point was the body, but they quickly understood that nudity alone was not enough to make a memorable image. What interested them was the relationship between the body and everything that could transform it: lingerie, corsets, boots, gloves, ropes, whips, furniture, props and carefully arranged settings. They photographed not so much nakedness as the signs of desire.
This distinction is essential to understanding their work. In a Biederer photograph, a pair of boots is rarely just a pair of boots. It may suggest authority, domination or simply a particular form of sexual sophistication. A corset shapes the body, but also imposes a silhouette, almost a character. A rope becomes the physical expression of a power relationship. A chair ceases to be merely furniture and becomes the centre of a scene.
Their photographs therefore function as a visual language in which objects carry several meanings at once. The viewer is not simply looking at a naked woman or a woman dressed in lingerie; the image encourages us to imagine what happened before the shutter was released and what might happen afterwards.
This is where their work begins to overlap with theatre and, at times, cinema.
Some of their series feel like scenes taken from a larger story. The figures appear to have roles, situations develop, and gestures become part of a narrative. The brothers also made a number of fetish films, including Dressage au fouet and La Vase brisée, extending into moving images the world they had already created in still photography.
Their real subject, then, may not have been sex itself, but fantasy: the way desire becomes fiction, and the way fiction can in turn create desire.
The Women of Biederer
Most of the women photographed by the Biederer brothers are anonymous today. We know their faces, their bodies and sometimes the situations in which they were photographed, but their biographies have almost entirely disappeared. It is one of the most intriguing paradoxes of this body of work: their bodies have survived the century while their names have largely been lost.
Some were probably professional models. Others came from theatre, music hall or fashion. The studio operated in a world where these professions overlapped considerably. A woman could be an actress one evening, a model the next day and appear a few weeks later in an advertisement for a lingerie company.
Among the identified models is Lucette Desmoulins, whose career offers a glimpse into the world in which the Biederers worked.
Desmoulins was both actress and model. She appeared in photographs made by Jacques and Charles in the 1920s, as well as in other images of the period. Jean-Gabriel Domergue also photographed her nude. She took part in beauty and elegance contests and performed on stage before moving into cinema in the early 1930s.
She appeared in films including Un soir de réveillon, 77 rue Chalgrin and Le Bossu. She belonged to a generation of young women moving between theatre, fashion and photography, at a time when an image could increasingly become a professional asset.
Then, like so many figures from that period, she almost disappears from the historical record. Sources allow us to follow part of her career until the beginning of the war, but her life after 1940 remains obscure, and her date of death is unknown.
What remains is her image.
That is particularly striking when looking at the Biederers’ wider body of work. The photographers are now identified, studied and collected; their models have often become anonymous. We possess their images without knowing their stories.
Ostra, or the Business of Desire
The Biederers were not working in isolation. Interwar Paris had a whole commercial network built around erotic photography, lingerie, specialised publications and images intended for collectors and a particular clientele.
The brothers developed the Ostra Editions, a name taken from Moravská Ostrava, their home town. Ostra became a publishing identity through which part of their erotic and fetish photography was distributed.
Their work was also connected to the world of Diana Slip, the lingerie company associated with Léon Vidal. Diana Slip worked with several important photographers of the period, including Brassaï, Jean Moral and Roger Schall. The presence of the Biederers within this network is revealing: they were not simply two photographers operating on the margins of society, but participants in a much more organised visual economy.
Their photographs circulated in different forms, through publications, series and photographic postcards. Some were intended for a general audience, while others were clearly aimed at a more specialised clientele. The same studio could produce relatively conventional lingerie photographs alongside far more explicit scenes of domination and fetishism.
Their ability to move between these different markets probably explains part of their professional longevity.
It also helps explain why their surviving work is difficult to catalogue precisely. Not every photograph carries the same signature, not every series is documented, and the studio produced a substantial body of work that has been dispersed over the decades.
It is therefore more accurate to speak of a Biederer visual world than to assume that every photograph can be attributed individually to Jacques or Charles.
An Aesthetic of Power
What is particularly striking in the Biederers’ photography is the way they represent power.
Their eroticism is not based solely on the exposure of the female body. It often depends on a relationship. Who is in control? Who is watching? Who is being watched? Who controls the scene? Who appears to be waiting for someone else’s decision?
The roles can shift, and the photographs constantly play with that uncertainty.
This is where their work becomes especially interesting from the perspective of photographic history. Fetishism is not simply represented as a sexual practice; it becomes an aesthetic. Boots, corsets, gloves and other accessories are transformed into instantly recognisable signs. They contribute to a visual vocabulary that would survive the Biederers by decades.
Elements of this language would later appear in the work of photographers, illustrators and publishers working within fetish culture. It would be an exaggeration, however, to describe Biederer as the inventor of this aesthetic. Images of domination and fetishism existed long before them. Their contribution was rather to give these fantasies a distinctive photographic language and a degree of visual sophistication that still feels remarkable today.
The Paris History Forgot
For a long time, this kind of photography remained outside the official history of the medium.
The reason is not difficult to understand. Museums traditionally favoured reportage, modernist photography, documentary work or fashion, while erotic photography was often dismissed as commercial or pornographic material without serious artistic value.
The research and collecting work of figures such as Alexandre Dupouy helped change that perception. His book Les Éditions Ostra : l’âge d’or du fétichisme, published in 2007 to accompany an exhibition at the Les Larmes d’Éros gallery in Paris, played an important role in bringing this material back into view.
Today, Biederer photographs can be found in specialist collections and on the market for vintage photography. Glass plates, photographic series and prints continue to resurface, suggesting that a substantial part of their production remains to be identified.
The paradox is striking: work that was once intended to circulate discreetly has become collectible.
Then the War Came
The war gives the story of Jacques and Charles Biederer a dimension that cannot be separated from their work.
The brothers were Jewish. As antisemitic laws were imposed in occupied France, their professional and private lives were gradually destroyed. The world of Boulevard du Temple, the models, the photographic sessions and the Ostra editions now belonged to a past that was disappearing with extraordinary speed.
In 1942, the brothers were interned at the Pithiviers camp, in the Loiret.
Pithiviers was one of the principal internment camps in occupied France. Thousands of Jews were held there under appalling conditions before being deported to Auschwitz. Between 1941 and 1943, Pithiviers and the neighbouring camp at Beaune-la-Rolande became major assembly points for Jews arrested in France before their deportation.
For the Biederers, photography now belonged to another life.
Charles was deported on June 25, 1942, on Convoy No. 4, leaving Pithiviers for Auschwitz. He died there on August 15, 1942.
Jacques remained in France for a few more weeks.
On July 17, 1942, he was deported on Convoy No. 6. He arrived at Auschwitz. French records give July 22, 1942, as the date of his death.
Jacques was fifty-five, Charles was fifty.
They had built their professional lives together. They were separated by two convoys, and ultimately by only a few weeks in death.
Their businesses were finally liquidated in 1943 and the Biederer Studio disappeared.
Auschwitz
It is difficult to read these dates without thinking about the images they had made only a few years earlier.
In their photographs, bodies are allowed to play with convention. Women become dominant figures, men become submissive, identities shift and social roles are turned into theatre. The studio offers a temporary suspension of ordinary rules.
At Auschwitz, there was no theatre, no role to play, no scene that could be controlled. The fantasy of power had given way to a reality designed to strip people of all power.
That contrast gives the Biederer photographs a historical dimension that goes far beyond their erotic content. They document the cosmopolitan Paris of the interwar years, while the fate of their creators has made them part of the history of a world that the Holocaust almost completely destroyed.
Yet it is important not to turn their photographs retrospectively into symbols they could not have been at the time. Jacques and Charles did not know what was coming. They photographed women, developed prints, sold their work and continued their lives in a Paris that, despite growing political tensions, still operated under the assumption that certain things would remain.
That innocence is precisely what makes their story so painful.
What the Photographs Preserved
The extraordinary thing is that their work survived almost everything that might have destroyed it.
The men who made the photographs were murdered. Their studio disappeared, their archives were scattered. Most of their models became anonymous.
And yet the images continued to circulate. They can still be found in private collections, specialist archives, auction catalogues and books devoted to the history of erotic photography.
Some are almost a century old, yet they do not feel entirely old. Their visual vocabulary remains immediately legible. The bodies, accessories, power relationships and construction of fantasy still make sense to a contemporary eye.
Perhaps this is where the true modernity of Biederer lies.
The brothers understood that erotic photography did not necessarily depend on nudity. It depended on context, anticipation, suggestion and the gaze. A fully dressed woman could sometimes be more erotic than a completely naked body, provided the image left enough room for the imagination. Their photography occupies that space between what is shown and what is imagined.
An Art in Two Voices
It is worth returning to Jacques and Charles themselves.
History has often retained the name Jacques Biederer, but the Biederer Studio was the product of a fraternal collaboration. The two men worked together for decades, and it is now often impossible to establish with certainty which brother actually released the shutter on a particular photograph.
That uncertainty is not necessarily a problem. It is part of their history.
Their work was not the solitary statement of an artist pursuing an individual signature. It was the product of a studio, a business and a shared visual world.
Perhaps that is also why the production feels so coherent. They had built a world together. A world of corsets and boots, mysterious women, games of domination, carefully constructed settings and photographic fantasies. A world that belonged to interwar Paris and would disappear with them.
The Women Still Look Back
When we look at a Biederer photograph today, there is no way of knowing what the model was actually thinking when the picture was taken. Was she an actress, a professional model, a willing participant in the game, or simply a woman being paid to pose? Was she amused, provocative or indifferent? For most of them, we will probably never know.
That is why Lucette Desmoulins matters.
Her name allows us to move beyond the surface of the image. We know that she existed outside the studio, that she worked on stage, that she appeared in films, that she was photographed by several artists and that she belonged to a professional world in which the image had become a form of currency.
But even her story eventually disappears; what remains is her face.
As it does with all those women whose names we no longer know. They still look back at us from the photographs.
The Last Image
Jacques Biederer died at Auschwitz on July 22, 1942. His brother Charles had died there a few weeks earlier. Neither would see the end of the war, the rediscovery of their photographs or the collectors who, decades later, would sometimes pay thousands of euros for their work.
They would never know that their photographs would be studied, exhibited, published and recognised as a singular chapter in the history of twentieth-century erotic photography.
Nor would they know that some of the photographs they made in the apparently carefree Paris of the 1920s and 1930s would survive their deaths by almost a century.
That is what gives the Biederer archive its particular resonance. These photographs speak of desire, certainly, but they also speak of time. They show women playing at freedom in a city that still believed it could remain free. They belong to a society experimenting with new forms of sexuality, fashion and representations of the body, unaware that within a few years a totalitarian ideology would seek to destroy millions of lives simply because of who they were.
Jacques and Charles Biederer were swept into that history.
Their photographs escaped it.
And when we look today at those women in corsets, those boots, those gazes and those carefully constructed scenes of desire, we are not simply looking at an erotic curiosity from the 1920s or 1930s. We are looking at fragments of a vanished world, photographed by two men who, only a few years later, would themselves be erased from it.
They built a theatre of desire. History took the stage away from them. It could not make the images disappear.
Grégory Herpe
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