Photography is Paul's vocation...

Paul and Fernande buy a shop in the street named ►rue du Moulin in ►Vimoutiers. At the beginning, Paul is a photographer, thereafter he becomes editor. Fernande gives lessons of drawing and painting. She draws herself the humorous postcards that Paul edits.

Paul likes sincerely villagers ...

and he enjoys photographing them. He makes series of norman villagers and costumes, such as  "La noce en Pays d'Auge", "Coiffes et costumes anciens", "Au pays Normand"...

He also loves photographing his children, his family. Everyone poses for the postcards : his daughter Geneviève, his wife Fernande, his son Maurice, a cousin Lucie, his mother Joséphine ...

But war is declared and Paul must go on August 2, 1914 ... when he comes back home on permission, he teaches to Fernande how to take and develop photographs. Thus postcards carry on their way in spite of the absence ... But one day, Paul does not return. He died on the Field of Honor on October 20, 1918 ... Then Fernande must sell everything, the shop and all that goes with, cameras, postcards, pencils, painting ... she does not keep anything.

Fernande left Vimoutiers in 1921 with her children, but her daughter Geneviève never forgot her childhood in the village.

Hundred years later ...

one can still find rather easily vintage cards of Paul Bunel, but on some of them, the name was removed and replaced by that of the successive photographers who bought the shop.

Paul Bunel's photographies remain testimony of the past nowadays. Many of them illustrate www. vimoutiers.net. They are all the more precious since  Vimoutiers was bombed out in 1944.

written from Marie-Christine's narrative

great-grandaughter of Paul and Fernande Bunel

 ~ June 2006 ~

Paul Bunel is the author of many vintage cards

which illustrate this site

 

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" Photography is like hunting, it’s the instinct of the hunt without the desire to kill.  It’s the hunt of angels . . . You trail, you aim, you fire and Clic !  ... instead of a dead man, you make him everlasting! "  ... a wink from Chris Marker .... 

►Paul Bunel     ►Two or three things about his life