I am the curator of an exhibition dedicated to Ai Weiwei in Marseille, Ai Weiwei.Fan Tan at the spectacular museum designed by Rudy Ricciotti on the shores of the Mediterranean, the Mucem, which opened this week. Since the purpose of this blog is to communicate my...
It is very difficult to come up with something new within the genre of fashion photography, which is highly codified, conventional and often boring in its perfection. Think super skinny models who have barely hit adolescence, perfect lighting, flawless complexions and...
She’s a mythical creature in the history of cinema. Marlene Dietrich, actress turned singer, German turned American, sometimes feminine sometimes androgynous, invented the image of a multifaceted and liberated woman. Her endless legs, those fingers elongated by a...
Magazine photographers are kind of artists on the fly. The pages are flicked through quickly and the images are often covered in writing or sliced in half. Yes, the most striking shots will stay in the mind, but what was the particular style of the photographer you...
‘I do not see art as an investment at all. That’s not to say that among the 5,000 works I own, some haven’t risen substantially in price—my Basquiat drawings for example—but that’s not my objective. After all, I’ve never resold anything.’ The celebrated French fashion...
The tragedy of great artists is their far-sightedness means they’re often misunderstood. Take the American photographer Walker Evans (1903-1975), one of the very big names in world photography, someone who in the 1930s was throwing himself into a new genre we refer to...
The brilliance of certain artists lies in their ability to force you to really look at what they have to show. It’s true of German-born, London-based artist Wolfgang Tillmans (b. 1968). Slowly but surely he’s become one of the superstars of contemporary art, and...
‘It’s apparently easier to sell a $30 million Picasso than a Henri Cartier-Bresson for 8,000 euros these days’. This statement by Johannes Faber, an Austrian dealer specialising in modern photography, is based on recent results in the market. On 15 May in New York the...
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KJC9wbiKeV8 You can’t mistake her. She is coiffed like a contemporary Capuchin monk with her two-tone haircut, white at the roots, burgundy at the tips. She walks slowly but her spirit fizzes like lightning. Agnes Varda is...
“If you are lucky enough to have lived in Paris as a young man, then wherever you go for the rest of your life, it stays with you, for Paris is a moveable feast.” Ernest Hemingway. A moveable feast. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nrIJjB_dyP0 When Paul Gauguin went...
I’ve told this story before. In the French charming provinces, in a place known for its Medieval kings, its snails and its wine, is a small town. There, in one of its working class neighbourhoods is a building designed by the Japanese starchitect Shigeru Ban that...
Paris-Photo, the biggest fair dedicated to photography is held in the French capital for two decades now, and this year back again under the Grand Palais’ glass roof. The true benefit of this mega commercial show is that it attracts the very best specialists in the...