Jean-Loup Trassard



Jean-Loup Trassard (11 August 1933, Saint-Hilaire-du-Maine) is a French writer and photographer.

He says of himself that he is a "writer of agriculture." Since 1961, he has been publishing short texts, narratives, photographs and texts in which he recounts his "territory" by Gallimard and Le Temps qu'il fait. The vision he offers of the traditional rural civilization which disappears irrevocably, is both ethnological and poetic.

In 2012 he was awarded the grand prix of the Société des gens de lettres Magdeleine-Cluzel for the whole of his work.

Biography
His father, René, was an entrepreneur ("fermier de droits de place" - "farmer of rights of place"-) on the markets, which was a service to the communes organizing markets, in Brittany and in Normandy. He was a single child who went to the secular school of the village. Catechism, communions and masses were little appreciated.

He lived a country childhood punctuated by agricultural work and which would influence all his work as a writer and photographer. He lost his mother in 1945.

He had poor beginnings in high school (by correspondence then at Lycée Michelet in Vanves). From the 4th to the philosophy class he attended the Lycée of Laval, whose last two years he spent as a boarder. He obtained a degree in law from the Faculté de droit de Paris. Between these legal studies, he followed the courses of ethnology at the Musée de l'Homme and especially, during two years, the courses of prehistory of André Leroi-Gourhan.

Literature
In 1955, he married. His first child, François, was born in 1957. At the end of 1959, he sent his first texts to Jean Paulhan who received him at the La Nouvelle Revue française (NRF) and led him to Georges Lambrichs, the new literary director at Gallimard.

In July 1960, came the first publication, Le lait de taupes ("Mole milk") at the NRF. In 1960, he became a farmer of communal rights alongside his father, then in his place after his disappearance in 1968. He kept this profession until 31 December 2000. In 1961, a friendship was established with Jean Clay, a journalist and historian of art, who, for a time, was his first reader and an important support. Jean Clay later became the publisher of the Macula publishing house

In 1962, Jean-Loup remarried. He has a daughter, Laure, in 1968.

Literary journey and photography
Around Georges Lambrichs, he met Dominique Aury and Constance Delaunay, and all the authors of the new series of Georges Lambrichs, Le Chemin : Jacques Borel, Le Clézio, Michel Butor, Georges Perros, Jean Roudaut, Pierre Bourgeade, Ludovic Janvier, Marianne Alphant, Max Loreau and many others, including Henri Thomas, though he was older.

The magazines successively directed by Georges Lambrichs, Les Cahiers du Chemin then the NRF, in which he actively participated, gave rise to various meetings where the authors met. Some of them became and remained very close friends: Michel Chaillou, Michel Deguy, Gérard Macé. From time to time he published in the magazine Poésie directed by Michel Deguy. In 1980, he met Georges Monti, a publisher installed at Cognac.

The first exhibition of photographs took place in 1983, at La Rochelle Chapelle Fromentin (expo. collective), then Montpellier in 1987 (Médiathèque) and Caen in 1991 (Théâtre). In 1992, sixty photographs are exhibited for three months at Centre Pompidou under the title La campagne de Jean-Loup Trassard. Bernard Lamarche-Vadel, a writer and art critic, introduced him into the world of photography.

He is a breeder: cows Maine-Anjou, calves under the mother, oxen fed in the old way. Since 1953 until today, he divides his time, in varying proportions, between the Mayenne countryside and Paris. He extends his action locally by creating in 1999, the association Mémoire rurale au Pays de l'Ernée whose aim is to trace the evolution of lifestyles in the 20th century on the territory in order to leave a trace for future generations.

Studies on Jean-Loup Trassard

 * "Jean-Loup Trassard : le cerceau de bois", by Yves Leclair, in L’Ecole des lettres (II) n°5, éd. L’École des Loisirs, 15 November 1984.
 * "Territoire de Jean-Loup Trassard", by Yves Leclair, in La Nouvelle Revue Française, n°438-439, éd. Gallimard, July–August 1989.
 * "Ouailles de J.-L.Trassard" by Yves Leclair, in La Nouvelle Revue Française, n°471, éd. Gallimard, April 1992
 * "Un Mayennais au souffle cosmique : Jean-Loup Trassard", by Pascal Rannou, in "Voix d’Ouest en Europe, souffles d’Europe en Ouest", acts of symposia, Angers, Presses de l’Université, 1993, p. 559-572
 * "Trassard", by Yves Leclair, in La Nouvelle Revue Française, n°503, éd. Gallimard, December 1994.
 * Mythe et réalité dans "Nous sommes le sang de cette génisse" by Jean-Loup Trassard, mémoire de maîtrise de Julien Guerrier, Angers, 1999
 * L’écriture du bocage : sur les chemins de Jean-Loup Trassard, texts collected and interview by Arlette Bouloumié, Angers, Presses de l’Université, 2000
 * Salade ou rôti ? Jean-Loup Trassard, écrivain photographe : de la composition du paysage à l’illusionnisme, by Pierre Guicheney, revue 303, n° 113 - 4th Quarter 2010
 * "Jean-Loup Trassard", Cahier n° 11 (dir. Dominique Vaugeois), Le Temps qu'il fait, 2014.