Jacques Natteau

Jacques Natteau (15 November 1920 – 17 April 2007) was a French director of photography.

Natteau was born on 15 November 1920 in Istanbul, Turkey. His father, Edouard Chiuminatto, was a captain in the French Army who had fought in World War I and was wounded multiple times in the battles of the Somme, Chemin des Dames, and Verdun. After World War I, his father was dispatched to Turkey as part of the Allied occupation force where he met Rosine Foscolo, a direct descendant of the 19th century Italian poet, Ugo Foscolo. Edouard and Rosine married and gave birth to their only child, Jacques Etienne Chiuminatto. Under the terms of the 1919 Versailles Treaty, the defeated Ottoman Empire, as an ally of Imperial Germany, surrendered and was occupied by Anglo-French forces. The French Army seized Turkey's railways and Edouard was put in charge of administering the railway network.

When Natteau was three years old, Kemal Atatürk came to power and ended the Allied occupation of Turkey. The family settled in Paris and the young Jacques Natteau won admittance to Paris's prestigious Lycée Henri IV where he graduated in 1938 earning his Baccalauréat. He later remembered that, on 4 February 1934, he literally ran for his life as violent riots broke out in Paris prior to the collapse of the French government.

Growing up in Paris's artistic 6ème arrondissement in the 1930s, Natteau came to know some of its most successful residents including Jean Cocteau, Jacques Prévert, Jean-Paul Sartre, …