Born in New York, 1926. Lived in Paris. For a small, but now legendary elect circle of African American expatriates in the Paris of the early Sixties, just as the name of James Baldwin meant Writer, Emil Cadoo's meant Photographer. His photographs of his friends documented some of the most brilliant members of his generation with unmatched intimacy. Cadoo may be best known for his book-covers (his work for Groove press and Evergreen Review was both legendary and notorious) but in Paris Cadoo also embarked in one of those great solitary quests that extend the limits of a chosen art-form. His Statue, St. Germain and Luxembourg series, and his important erotic works, witness to what Edith Piaf told him when first seeing herself portrayed by Cadoo: “Mr. Cadoo, you are not a photographer; you are a poet with a camera.”