Born in 1925 in Tours, France, and educated in the mediums of painting and drawing, as well as photography, Roger Catherineau championed photographic expressionism. Catherineau created photographs and photograms concurrent with the development of Abstract Expressionism, yet with his premature death in 1962, his innovative body of work and his career had gone largely unnoticed until its rediscovery by the historian Christian Bouqueret in the early 1990s.

Catherineau received inspiration and encouragement from the renowned German photographer and teacher Otto Steinert, who was the founder of the Fotoform movement of postwar German photographers.  Steinert included him in the 1954-55 exhibition and book Subjektive Fotografie 2. Catherineau and Steinert were less concerned with objective representation and more interested in subjective interpretation and abstraction.