Seeing before Words

Can you take me back to the very beginning, what first made you pick up a camera?
My father was a very good photographer, and we lived in a beautiful house in Paris. The first time I picked up a camera, I think it was to photograph my own room. So, it started very early. I borrowed my dad’s camera and photographed what was around me, the house, essentially.

From around 15, during my summer breaks, I would ask photographers, friends or acquaintances of my parents, if I could come and work for free just to learn the technical craft. The first time I worked as an assistant was probably at 15 or 16. I thought it was important, at that first stage, to see not only the fantasy of being a photographer, but what it means to be behind a camera in a real situation. My parents' house attracted many photographers, Helmut Newton among them. I was so fascinated that I’d often escape school just to watch them work. To see how different photographers could have such different points of view when looking at the same thing. From a very early age, I could recognise the signature of many photographers. A friend of my parents also introduced me to the work of Brassaï very early on. I was reading my parents' magazines, Elle, Abitare, Domus, and already very drawn to the medium.

You came to photography very young and very quickly. Your time at art school was brief, overtaken almost immediately by real work. Looking back, where do you think you actually learned your craft? Was it from specific people, from the work itself, or from something else entirely?

Honestly, not from school. I have a funny story: the photography teacher told me that if I didn’t come to his class, he would give me an A-plus. So, I was very happy to spend that time learning other things, graphic design, typography, painting, sculpture. And then when I started working, I simply couldn’t do both. I didn’t have enough time.

My real education came from travelling and learning from other people. Travelling with Bruce Chatwin, for example. Spending summers with Bertolucci. Learning architecture through experiences I’d never have had in a classroom. I did my own research. It was informal, but it gave me everything.

Is there anything you wish you had been taught that you had to learn the hard way?

No, nothing. Everything came afterwards. And what formal education doesn't teach you is how to be free, how to find your own way. They don’t teach you not to be scared. They want to put you in a niche. I was never interested in that. I just wanted to see the world and form my own interpretation of what I saw.

Growing up surrounded by your family's world, the decorating, the fabrics, the houses, did that feel like a natural context for photography, or were you reacting against it?

It was not truly a rebellion. I have always photographed my surroundings, my life as I've lived it. The one thing I did have to fight for was simply the right to be a photographer, because my parents didn’t really want me to do it. They were afraid I couldn’t make it. I’m sure they would have preferred something more conventional, an architect, a doctor. Though their own businesses weren’t conventional, really. They opened their first in 1950, which was quite unusual for the time.

So, there was a rebellion of sorts, but one that worked with those aesthetics rather than against them, pushing them forward in my own way. I had a speaking problem as a child. I was almost autistic, I think. And the thing that made me feel whole was looking at art and objects.

John Berger opens “Ways of Seeing” with the idea that seeing comes before words, that it’s sight, not language, that first establishes our place in the world. For most people that’s a philosophical proposition. Looking at your life, it seems almost literally true. Do you experience it that way?

Yes, especially because I had difficulties with words. I think I exercised my eye in a far more developed way than other people, precisely because I couldn’t really speak. I built something different, a way of paying attention to detail, of noticing things others might pass over.

You’ve moved between fashion and interiors throughout your career, two worlds that both traffic in beauty but operate very differently. Fashion is about performance, surfaces, the moment. Interiors are about accumulation, time, the residue of a life. Do you experience those as genuinely different ways of seeing, or is it the same eye applied to different material?

For me it’s the same thing, though a little different in practice. When I was doing fashion, I was always placing the models into specific environments. The background was as important as the clothes themselves. It was always about adding life and character to a space. Fashion, interiors, it’s always about bringing a point of view to a setting. The eye doesn’t change.

Cy Twombly, Carlo Mollino, Casa Malaparte, your great subjects seem to be places and figures you were almost haunted by before you photographed them. Is there a subject you’ve been obsessed with for years that you still haven’t managed to access?

I’d like to do something with Rashid Johnson. I’m very open to a new generation. I was deeply inspired by an older generation of artists, and now I’m very much looking forward to working with younger ones. When you photograph a place or an artist or something that truly inspires you, it’s always a fantastic moment. A very happy one.

You’ve spent years being invited into some of the most private spaces in the world, Twombly, Avedon, Mollino, Bourgeois. Has there ever been a moment where you walked in and knew immediately it wasn’t going to work? And if so, what do you do?

Very rarely, because I’m very careful about what I take on. I research beforehand. I would never accept an assignment for something I didn’t feel I wanted to do. If I don’t like a place, I’ll say no. I’m sorry, I don’t feel like it. That has happened many times. Even commercially. I’m not precious about it, but I won’t photograph something I don’t respond to. That’s simply not negotiable.

When you walk into a space you’re about to photograph, what actually happens? Is there a process, a method, or is it something less conscious than that?

It's less conscious than that, more a sensibility. For me, photography has always been about being almost like a narrator in a novel, finding the story that’s already there, in the light, in the objects, in what has accumulated over time. I don’t arrive with a plan. I arrive open.

You’ve described your house in Arles as a body of work rather than a home, something constantly changing, evolving with your projects. But a body of work is usually made for others to see. Who is that house actually for?

For me. Though I’d like eventually to turn it into a foundation, that’s a longer-term project. During COVID lockdown, I started photographing my own house as if it were the main subject, and I found it quite liberating to use my own surroundings as the central inspiration for something more personal. I do occasionally do studio visits, but I value my privacy. Even if I show the house, it will always be in fragments, never the whole thing.

And what are you working on now?

I’m working with Polaroids and paint, taking the Polaroid as the base image and then painting on top of it, intervening on my own photographs. A lot of artists work with found images, but I find it interesting to work with my own image, to do something with it. You might want to destroy it, erase the subject, give it another quality entirely. In the next couple of months, I’ll be doing an exhibition of collages. I’m very interested in mixed media now, layering, destroying, painting, building on top of it.

Are there any upcoming exhibitions?

I have a show at Gallifet in Aix-en-Provence, called Ne rien Jeter (until September 27th). Essentially 33 years of more personal photographs, work I started when I also began writing, painting and drawing on my prints, which I never showed. It's been sitting in my studio ever since. And alongside that, my latest work, where I also write and paint on the images. It's the first time this body of work has been shown publicly. There's a large room dedicated to Rome, a room dedicated to artists' studios, Twombly, Schnabel and others. The idea is for people to understand the human moment connecting all of it. And in late April, I'm part of a group show at the museum of antiquity in Arles focused on Venus. I've done a lot of work on Venus. I like connecting antiquity and modern art, mixing things together.

Are there photographers you particularly admire or collect?

I’m a big collector of photography. Erotic photography by Helmut Newton, vintage prints by Luigi Ghirri of Morandi’s studio, Brancusi photographs, a lot of Brassaï prints, especially of Picasso’s studio, Turbeville, a lot of 1930s Japanese photography, some Man Ray, including his photograph of Marcel Duchamp, a nude by Man Ray of Lee Miller. She has always fascinated me, as a photographer, as a model, as a woman who lived so many lives. I nearly bought the rights to her life story years ago. A lot of 18th-century Egyptian photographs. All kinds of things. And some Nan Goldin, among the first I bought was a photograph of one of her girlfriends in a bathtub.

I don’t buy as much as I used to. I recently bought an Álvarez Bravo because I’m planning a new book project on Mexico. I like to collect photographs as a starting point for something else.

You’ve said you distrust photographers who need a discourse. But forty years on, looking at the body of work you’ve built, do you think you’ve been making one all along without realising it?

Perhaps. For me, photography is about sensibility, being almost like a narrator, giving shape to what moves you. I like to think of my body of work as chapters in a book, each project a different chapter. And I think there should eventually be a biography of sorts, something almost in the manner of Edmund de Waal. Very little photography in it, more about experience. And after that, a book on my collection, a catalogue of memory and objects. Because everything I’ve collected feels almost like inherited family objects, except nobody left them to me. A kind of fake family accumulation.

In my kitchen I have an old poster of Miguel Barceló that I bought for about 50 francs. And right next to it is a painting that he gave me. For me, they carry exactly the same emotional weight. It’s not a question of being expensive or collectable. It’s whether something speaks to you.