Content area
Full Text
Raymond Grosset, who has died aged 89, ran the last of the family photo agencies - Rapho - for over 50 years, working with, among others, Bill Brandt and Eugene Smith. Through the agency he combined his greatest loves - work, wife and children. Although he retired over a decade ago, the agency continued to be his home from home. Quite naturally so, since it occupied the entire third floor of the family house on the Rue d'Alger in Paris's first district. Rapho was derived from Charles Rado, a Hungarian Jew who pitched up in Paris in the late 1920s, and fell in with such photographic luminaries as Kertesz, Brassai and Ergy Landau, a young woman who Grosset happened to meet on holiday in 1930.
Fascinated, possibly by her and certainly by her brand new miniature Rolleiflex, as a keen amateur photographer, Grosset was also keen to meet Charles Rado. He followed the initial fortunes of the original Rado-Photo enterprise as he pursued his own training as a film technician. By 1939 he was running a laboratory in Finland for Paramount, meeting Greta Garbo, and watching anxiously as...