Delpire standing beside a display of Photo Poche books at the retrospective exhibition Delpire & Co. at Maison Européenne de la Photographie, Paris, 2009.
Delpire was editor-in-chief of the cultural reviewNeuf. He published books of photography, illustration and graphic art through Éditions Delpire and Photo Poche. Photo Poche has been described as "the most successful series of photography monographs ever published", books that "have introduced successive generations to photography".[3] Delpire was the first to publish many notable books of photography including Les Américains (1958, The Americans) by Robert Frank, "perhaps the most influential photography book of the 20th century";[4] and Les Gitans (1975, Gypsies) by Josef Koudelka, "one of the defining photobooks of the 20th century".[5]
Delpire published three photography books under the short-lived imprintHuit (Eight): Doisneau's Les Parisiens tels qu'ils sont (Parisians as They Are, 1954); Cartier-Bresson's Les Danses à Bali (Dances in Bali, 1954), the first of a long collaboration between Delpire and his friend Cartier-Bresson; and George Rodger's Le Village des Noubas (The Village of the Nubas, 1955).[2]
In the mid-1950s in Paris he founded and ran the publisher Delpire & Co., which has continued to produce books under the name Éditions Delpire by photographers such as Cartier-Bresson, Lartigue, Brassaï, Doisneau, Frank and many others. Delpire & Co. published a series of books on culture called Encyclopédie Essentielle.[1]: 190 In 1957 the fifth work in Encyclopédie Essentielle was the first publication of Robert Frank's Les Américains (The Americans).[13]The Americans was "One of Delpire's pivotal contributions to photography":[12] it "changed the nature of photography, what it could say and how it could say it. [ . . . ] it remains perhaps the most influential photography book of the 20th century".[4] Delpire's edition, unlike later English-language editions, included texts by Simone de Beauvoir, Erskine Caldwell, William Faulkner, Henry Miller and John Steinbeck that Delpire positioned opposite Frank's photographs.[2][14] The Encyclopédie Essentielle series also included Les Allemands (The Germans, 1963) by René Burri.
Delpire & Co. also published children's books with its Dix sur Dix (Ten Out of Ten) series, employing illustrators such as André François and Alain Le Foll.[15] Its first was the début publication in book form of Crocodile Tears (1955) by André François, having already published it in Neuf No. 9 in 1953. Delpire & Co. was the first French publisher of Maurice Sendak's Where the Wild Things Are[2][12] (Max et les Maximonstres, 1967).
In 1955 Delpire created the brand identity for L'ŒIL magazine and was its artistic director for eight years.[citation needed]
Delpire ran an advertising agency,[12] Delpire Publicité / Delpire Werbung (Delpire Advertising), with clients that included Citroën and L'Oréal.[2][16] For a decade from around the mid 1950s, Delpire, in partnership with Claude Puech,[17] produced sales brochures and posters for Citroën, using the work of photographers (Helmut Newton, Sarah Moon, and others),[18] illustrators, painters and typographers.[17] Delpire Werbung also produced TV adverts for Citroën.[n 1]
Delpire opened Galerie Delpire in Saint-Germain-des-Prés, Paris, in 1963;[2] this exhibited photographs and books published by Delpire & Co.
Through his film production company, Delpire Productions, Delpire produced various films, notably some by the photographer and filmmaker William Klein, including Qui êtes vous, Polly Maggoo? (Who Are You, Polly Maggoo?).
Delpire set up a creative studio and publishing house called Idéodis.[2]
In 1982 he was appointed by the French arts minister Jack Lang to be director of the Centre national de la photographie (National Center of Photography, now Galerie nationale du Jeu de Paume). Whilst director until 1996 he organised exhibitions and created a collection of small, numerically sequenced softcover pocket-sized books titled Photo Poche, of which there are hundreds on photographers and photographic themes. (They are now [2015] instead published by Actes Sud.) Liz Jobey in the Financial Times described them as "the most successful series of photography monographs ever published", books that "have introduced successive generations to photography".[3]
