 Speaking of women, you convey a very particular vision of women in your photographs... These are images that belong to beauty. It's like a painter's muse, for instance. Modigliani saw women in a particular way, and I too have a particular woman in my mind. For me she is the convocation of a form of reality. But this woman has not the least existence in reality, she belongs to the image. Once the image is finished, this woman no longer exists for me. She disappears, because I no longer need this reality.
I also worked with Richard Avedon, Irving Penn, Bob Richardson... Bob Richardson? That's interesting. I see the link between you and Bourdin, for instance, but Bob Richardson's work always had a kind of hard edge. And yet, Bob Richardson became a friend, and Guy Bourdin never did! I felt that Bob Richardson gave women an image that was almost gypsy-like, with personality, but feminine nonetheless. Guy Bourdin used my work, if you like...well, he used certain expressions, certain forms of expression from which he then created his own images. I don't very much like what I did with Guy Bourdin, and I don't like the character either. For me, Guy Bourdin's images are a form of misogyny, and I had difficulty dealing with his creation of the image of women, his way of lighting them, it makes me very uncomfortable. He was the Vogue photographer when I arrived there, he was the only photographer working for them and I got to know him very well. But I speak very seldom of Guy because I don't have very fond memories of him, so why bother? It's interesting, because despite all he was criticized for, Guy Bourdin has had an enormous influence on fashion and fashion imagery over the past couple of years.
Silence and immobility are extremely close. You could say that for me, beauty is found in immobility, silence and whiteness. It's all a means of pulling back from the world. When people think of Serge Lutens and Shiseido, a white face with red lips and kohl-black eyes comes immediately to mind. Yet you do indulge in many other colours.
Yes, I change a lot. From time to time I do intense yellows and fuchsias, or
inversely, pale pale blues and mauves. But people do seem to remember mostly the
red, white and black. Where does your colour inspiration come from? It comes just like that. Like the perfumes, it's a matter of intuition: I have to make such-and-such a colour because it's that colour's moment. Either you're intuitive, or you're not. It's the colour which explains itself, says what it needs to become, which makes itself all on its own! Voilà. I am it's assistant, that's all!
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In your early days of image-making at Vogue, you worked a lot with Guy
Bourdin...
Yes, it's crazy, the influence of Guy Bourdin at the moment is incredible. Even
Jean-Paul Goude is doing Guy Bourdin! The advertisement he just did for Eden -
the girl covered in pink roses with one breast revealed - if that's not Guy
Bourdin! It's a very stupid vision of women: always bending over, scooping
things up, running away.
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