IN LIVING COLOUR

There was a magic moment in 1950s Paris when the post-war gloom finally lifted. One man captured this change in all its glory - and he was not French. Robin Muir looks back on the pioneering work of Japanese photographer Ihei Kimura

In Paris in 1945, when the war was all but over, French Vogue reopened its doors. Not that it had ever intended to close them. It did so only when the enemy was at the gates. The thought of flourishing under an occupying nation, whose triumphs in the magazine's area of expertise were small - battleship-grey colour schemes and a multiplicity of leather- to-cowhide traditional costumes - was too undignified to contemplate. It suspended itself for five years. The "Liberation" issue appeared in January 1945 to no fanfare. There wasn't much to celebrate. Paris, if anything, looked bleaker in these early postwar days than it had during occupation. And Vogue, always a reliable indicator of the prevailing mood, certainly never looked bleaker; the washed-out and spidery illustrations of Christian Berard its only splashes of colour.

Still, at least it wasn't London, whence Nancy Mitford had fled, writing home from Paris: "I feel a totally different person as if I had come out of a coalmine into daylight." And at least it wasn't the German border village where Robert Capa discovered families sheltering in foxholes. Or ` Warsaw, where Werner Bischof found only the shells of buildings to photograph. Or Hamburg where the eye of Henri Cartier-Bresson saw nothing quirky in the solemn faces of the unemployed. When these great names, some of the finest of mid-20th-century photography, turned their attention back to Paris, where so many were based, the result was a series of dully monochromatic representations of the city in Vogue and other magazines.

And then it all changed. Ernst Haas declared that for him the war was finally over when colour film arrived in abundance: "I would like to do black-and-white again," he declared later, "but one of the reasons I went into colour was that it made a distinction between the greyness of one period and the life that came later."

Perhaps no one caught the soaring exuberance of the life that came later quite like the out-of-place Ihei Kimura, a Japanese photographer who had endured his own wartime privations (joblessness, destitution). He arrived in Paris in 1954 for a three-month stay, with no preconceptions and no expectations other than to link up with Henri Cartier-Bresson, whom he revered. (He had already met and assisted Capa in Tokyo.) And to photograph a city that had radiated its esprit eastwards as well as west. Kimura was the first Japanese photographer since the 1930s to be able to travel in Europe for such an extended period.

He came with bag after bag full to the brim with colour film. Japanese firms were paying him to try out the fast colour films and lightweight lenses that would transform post-war photography. Suddenly, sponsored by Fuji and Asahi, Paris never looked lovelier. It must be said, though, that Kimura preferred to use German-made Leica cameras - he was one of the first Japanese to acquire one - and to work with very slow film, which lent the best of his pictures a certain graininess and, occasionally, an evocative blur.

The first photographer he met in Paris was Cartier-Bresson who, despite his mistrust of colour photography, became Kimura's unofficial guide. Cartier-Bresson's black-and-white logic was vividly recounted by the editor of Photo magazine. In the early 1990s, he excitedly called up Cartier- Bresson to show him 40 Ektachromes taken by the photographer in the 1950s but lost for decades. They were probably the only existing colour pictures ever taken by the great man. Two days later, Cartier-Bresson came by, held them up to the light and slashed them to pieces with a pocketknife. "This was bullshit!" he declared on his way out.

But back in 1954, Cartier-Bresson was polite enough to leave the Japanese visitor to his own devices and introduced him firstly to the photographer Robert Doisneau (who became a lifelong friend) and to the ` working-class arrondissements of Menilmontant and the Canal Saint-Martin. Kimura's liveliest images, from a portfolio which still glows with vitality, were of ordinary people going about their daily business - while displaying that tremendous and unconscious flair so characteristic of Parisians. Kimura had an empathy with such subjects. In Japan he had once agreed to shoot an advertising campaign for a detergent manufacturer, and surprised his client not with a glossy and celebratory soapsud tableau, but with scenes of workers' dilapidated huts and arduous factory life.

But Kimura was equally entranced by Paris's most colourful vistas: cafe life on the pavements of the Champs-Elysees, the markets of Les Halles, the arbitrary signage and abstract colours of shop-fronts, the chic-ness of race-goers at Longchamp and of visitors to the Opera. He happened to reach Paris in the throes of recovery, bang in the middle of the "New Look". Even a quasi-Marxist belle-lettriste such as Simone de Beauvoir could exult that "in 1954 my books have earned me a great deal of money". The photographer Inge Morath finally realised that better days lay ahead for Paris when she found so many cars in her street that she was unable, for the first time, to park her own. How better to celebrate this joie- de-vivre than to record it in all its natural hues.

Kimura spent three months in total in Paris, though he broke up his stay with visits to Germany and Italy. He was not idle: his European sojourn is reckoned to have yielded 5,000 photographs. Kimura was already a star in his native land by 1954, and he went on to become one of its greatest photographers, whether of the snowy landscapes of Akita or the markets of Okinawa, or of what remained of Nagasaki in the 1950s. He had made his first exposures in 1910 at the age of nine and only stopped making them on his death in 1974. Today, to be awarded the prestigious Kimura Prize, founded in his memory, is to have arrived, photographically-speaking, in Japan.

There were probably more controversial photographers stalking the streets of Paris in the 1950s and perhaps even better ones. There were certainly a lot of them: Izis, Boubat, Burri, Ronis and the photographers of Magnum in its infancy, Capa, Seymour and Cartier-Bresson. Few, though, came as unencumbered with preconceptions as Kimura and few could exult in the extraordinariness of quotidian Parisian life as the first Japanese man let loose in Europe after the war, with suitcases full of colour film, a clutch of interchangeable lenses and, above all, an understated idea of what made a photograph great. By the time he left in 1955, Vogue could now report that "the French concept of a civilised life has been maintained".