Meet... Djuna Barnes, Solita Solano & Maurice Louis Branger
If it looks like the bohemian Parisians involved in that famous 1920s photo are living their best life, it's because they are
I have no doubt in my mind that you’ve seen this photo. It’s used to illustrate all kinds of stories online and in print – stories about Parisian women, fashion moodboards, the Roaring Twenties, female friendship, cafe culture… the list goes on and on.
Likely taken in 19261, this enigmatic photo has somehow managed to perfectly encapsulate the spirit of the time while also remaining just as relatable nearly 100 years later; the huge number of Instagram posts and street style shots of female friends sitting outside Parisian cafes is testament to this scene’s enduring appeal.
But somewhere along its journey on the internet (where it can now be purchased as a framed print, or printed onto tote bags, yoga mats, coffee mugs and more) and while gaining layers of new meanings, this famous photo’s real story has started to get lost. Not merely two strangers spotted by a passing photographer, these women are in fact the American writers, Djuna Barnes and Solita Solano, who lived and worked in Paris for most of the Twenties. The photo was taken by French photographer Maurice Louis Branger.
Although both women were young writers hailing from New York, as far as we know they first met in Paris, and it’s here that they would become part of a literary circle of avant-garde, mostly expatriate, writers and artists who had made the City of Light their home.
Djuna Barnes was already a sought-after freelancer for the New York Press and the city’s many other leading publications when in 1921 she was offered the opportunity of a lifetime: a well-paid Paris correspondent position for monthly American magazine McCall’s.2
As a writer, Barnes flourished while living in France and was at one point described as “the most important woman writer we had in Paris.”3 Her 1936 novel ‘Nightwood,’ partly inspired by her time in the French capital and considered to be one of the earliest examples of lesbian literature, “attained enormous popularity among young European intellectuals all the way from Rome to Berlin.”4
Her soon-to-be friend Solita Solano arrived in Paris with her lover Janet Flanner in 1922. She was also an accomplished freelance writer and a well-travelled one at that, having already spent time in Japan, China, the Philippines and Greece by the time she moved to France. Fluent in Spanish and Italian, Solano was seen as “worldly and elegant and lovely.”5
These three American women found their tribe at Gertrude Stein and her partner Alice B. Toklas’s avant-garde salon on the Left Bank where they spent their Saturday evenings.6 Here they mingled with the likes of Pablo Picasso, Ernest Hemingway, F. Scott Fitzgerald, Ezra Pound, James Joyce, Henri Matisse, and so many more. These gatherings would inspire Stein to name the group ‘The Lost Generation’ and would later be immortalised by Hemingway in his 1964 memoir ‘A Moveable Feast.’7
“[We were] richer than most in creative ambition and rather modest in purse,” wrote Flanner of the American expats, “We had settled in the small hotels on the Paris Left Bank near the Place Saint-Germain-des-Pres, itself perfectly equipped with a large corner cafe called Les Deux Magots … Though unacquainted with each other, as compatriots we soon discovered our chance similarity. We were a literary lot.”8
It’s no surprise then that this group of passionate young women would attract the attention of Maurice Louis Branger, an incredibly prolific French photographer who captured the rapid changes of Parisian life that occurred in the first half of the 20th century.
Sadly we know very little about Branger’s personal life, but incredibly over 31,000 negatives of his work still exist, most of which are now owned by Galerie Roger Viollet. While he captured some of the biggest events in Paris (such as the 1910 flood, WWI and the Roaring Twenties), Branger also had a keen eye for recording the daily rituals and simple pleasures (such as people bowling at the Jardin in Paris, prospective buyers browsing second-hand books along the banks of the River Seine, men stopping to admire the solar eclipse…) that may not have seemed that significant at the time but are filled with nostalgia and charm over a hundred years later.
Despite all of my research, it pains me that we might never know what circumstances inspired Maurice Louis Branger to photograph Solano and Barnes in Paris one day in the 1920s. However, there are a number of photos of the two women dressed in those same clothes, so it’s very likely that they spent the day together.
While Barnes is still occasionally written about in the mainstream media and features in gender and sexuality-themed literature courses the world over (I’ve still got my trusted copy of ‘Nightwood’ from my literature degree), less is known about Solano, who is mostly found as a footnote in biographies of Flanner. And though he has left an encyclopaedic amount of detail of French life through the tens of thousands of photos he took, Branger too remains an enigma.
Still, despite these gaps in our understanding, and perhaps even because of them, I find it magical that we can still find a compendium of meaning in this one simple photo of two women sharing a moment together in that unparalleled time they call les années folles.
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This has been confirmed by French blogger, Vesper Tilia, who has zoomed in on an April 1926 Harper’s Bazar magazine in one of the photos.
The Cambridge Companion to the Modernist Novel, edited by Morag Shiach (2007), p. 166
‘Paris was Yesterday’ by Janet Flanner (1972), p. xvii
‘Paris was Yesterday’ by Janet Flanner (1972), p. xvii
https://www.encyclopedia.com/women/encyclopedias-almanacs-transcripts-and-maps/solano-solita-1888-1975
If you’re wondering how these salons came to be, the anwer is surprisingly practical. Stein and Toklas had an impressive collection of modern art in their apartment and they were inundated with visitors wishing to see works by Matisse and Cézanne. As the visits were interrupting Stein’s work, she set a ‘jour fixe' of Saturday evenings, and so the weekly salon began. (As mentioned in ‘The Stein Salon Was the First Museum of Modern Art’ by James R. Mellow in The New York Times, 1st December, 1968)
The title comes from a letter Hemingway wrote to a friend in 1950, in which he said: “If you are lucky enough to have lived in Paris as a young man, then wherever you go for the rest of your life, it stays with you, for Paris is a movable feast.” Hotchner, A.E. (1966). Papa Hemingway. New York: Random House. p. 57.
‘Paris was Yesterday’ by Janet Flanner (1972)