Pierre Jamet

Pierre Jamet (1910-2000) was a singer (the tenor voice in Les Quatre Barbus), active outdoorsman, and above all – the gifted photographer who so brilliantly captured young French people enjoying their country’s hillsides, lakes, and seashore during the 1930s.

Pierre Jamet would photograph children and families on the roads of France, in youth hostels and summer resorts, during the leftist political period of the Popular Front, late 1930s.

Jamet actively participated in Léon Blum’s anti-fascist Popular Front, which swept to power in 1936.

The Popular Front and the youth hostel movement sought a “renewal of liberal political practice at the grassroots level in response to the rise of far right movements and the economic crisis in the early 1930s. The Popular Front was a combined revolt of the working class against and the youth against a social order that prevented them from playing any significant political role. The idea of youth, expressed through the ever-important word Jeunesse, was endowed with a number of meanings, both symbolic and real, and played a fundamental role in the orientation of the Popular Front’s policies.”

The hostels challenged pre-existing social and political structures, questioning patriarchy, gender, race, religion and national identifications in a concerted effort to reject fascism.