Photos of gay Paris pics under Nazi occupation draw fire

The 270 unpublished photographs by Andre Zucca, a French photographer who worked for the Nazi propaganda magazine Signal, are billed as the only major collection of color pictures taken during the four years of the Paris occupation.

The photo exhibit showing women in polka-dot dresses strolling down Paris boulevards and children playing at the Luxembourg gardens is under fire for failing to mention that thousands of Jews were deported and countless other Parisians endured hardship during the 1940-1944 occupation.

A picture of an elderly woman dressed in a black coat emblazoned with the yellow star and a second one of a man also wearing the badge of shame in Paris' Jewish quarter offer the only hint of Nazi persecution.

The head of cultural affairs at Paris city hall, Christophe Girard, called at the weekend for the exhibit called "Parisians under the Occupation" at the Paris City History Library to be shut down, saying he was "upset" by the photographs.

Zucca's "outlook shows nothing, or very little, of the reality of the occupation," said Girard.

But Paris Mayor Bertrand Delanoe stepped in the fray and said the exhibit would be allowed to continue as scheduled until July after ordering city historians to provide additional information to give visitors a fuller picture.

Visitors are now handed an information sheet, written in French, English and Spanish, explaining that Zucca "has opted for a vision that doesn't show -- or hardly shows -- the reality of occupation and its tragic aspects."

Jean Derens, the director of the library who commissioned the exhibit, said it would amount to censorship to shut down the exhibit and not show what he described as "exceptional works."

"These photographs are very powerful," said Derens, who shot back at calls for more detailed descriptions of each photograph to give context. "We need to give information on who took it and when, and then let the viewer take in the photograph."

The Paris library decided to organize the exhibit after thousands of negatives from Zucca photographs it had purchased in 1986 were digitized, allowing much of the color of the original works to be restored.