Resident there in 1931 he joined the 4th Zouaves Regiment, and equipped with a Leica and a Spido press camera by L. Gaumont & Cie, he made portraits of soldiers and landscapes of the desert as well as documenting the Tunisian population, hitherto ignored by photographers.
There he set up a specialized facilities for 35 mm processing and very quickly photographers such as Rogi André, Ilse Bing, Robert Capa, Ergy Landau and Man Ray became his clients.
On January 25, 1938, the gallery held the first salon of the professional photographers association Le Rectangle, which included Pierre Adam, Marcel Arthaud, Serge Boiron, Louis Caillaud, Yvonne Chevalier, André Garban, Sandro Guida, Pierre Jahan, Henri Lacheroy, and René-Leon Servant, whose founder was Sougez,[9] and in 1939 presented the Modernist photography club, Le Noir et Blanc, successor to the Rolleiclub.
Banned in Paris from continuing his professional practice during the Régime de Vichy, he went to New York City to reunite with his artist friends, among them Alexander Calder whom he had met in Tunisia.
In 1946, he helped co-found the influential Le Groupe des XV with René Servant, Marcel Bovis, Lucien Lorelle, Jean Séeberger, and Emmanuel Sougez.
[16] In the early 1950s Tuefferd lived for a time in Hudson, NH and photographed in the US, and in 1955 was included by Edward Steichen in the seminal world-touring The Family of Man that commenced at the Museum of Modern Art.
The Musée National des Arts et Traditions posthumously showed his circus imagery in an exhibit in 1999 entitled François Tuefferd: "Le cirque", photographs 1933-1954.