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At-5'10, with dark brown hair, blue gray eyes sparkling with intelligence, Jean Tournassoud was a sympathetic and cordial man, an excellent rider, and a brilliant military officer. A true renaissance man, he was well read and self-educated, a poet, writer, photographer and director.
His open and generous personality brought him many faithful friends from many circles from the simple folks of his village, artists from the intellectual circles in Lyon to the personalities of the political and military worlds with whom he had the opportunity to interact.
A man of humble background, Jean Tournassoud was modest but ambitious and hard-working, and a very sharp intelligence. His personality was characterized by high intellectual curiosity, a taste for the beautiful work, a sense of humor, a great appetite for life. These qualities are apparent in his photographs as well as in the songs and the poems he wrote throughout his life.
A sensitive and precise photographer, attentive to the plastic values, Jean Tournassoud would compose his portraits and his landscapes much as a 19th century painter, with a great control of the rules of composition and the behavior of light. In a style particular to him, he often acted as a producer in order to compose staged pictures very often full of humor. He casts on people a curious and amused gaze, and thus carrying highly personalized work.
In 1926, after retiring from the army, he acquired "La Smala", a beautiful residence on the shore of the Saône river in his native village of Montmerle. There, he sets up his darkroom and an office where he would carefully file his glass plates with appropriate notes and comments.
An inquisitive mind, open to the new techniques, he worked both in black and white and in color using the Lumière Autochrome plates (he was a friend of the Lumières). He was thus one of the pioneers of color photography in the early 20th century and one of the first photographers to have used color in the documentation of a war.
Over more than thirty years, moving from commissioned photographs to a more personalized work, he shot many varied subjects (animals, landscapes, still lives, monuments, life in the countryside, local traditions and folklore, portraits and family life, documentary photography). By their documentary and ethnographic value, as well as their artistic merit, these photographs became invaluable historical documents.
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