About this photograph :
Le baiser
« He had only caught a glimpse of Jane Birkin in Blow Up in 1966, finding her very pretty, but the role didn’t show her off to her advantage. Three years later Gainsbourg asked him if he wanted to do the sleeve for Jane’s next record. ‘Jane who?’ He said that he had always dreamt of using the bronzes on the Alexandre III Bridge as a background and that is how we found ourselves taking a frozen shot, minus 5 degrees with an icy wind. Jane was heroic. She invited us for tea at the Hôtel on rue des Beaux Arts. Serge then put his next record on his Teppaz, a duo with Jane, He just said: “I will be banned on all the radio stations, but I will be a hit in the clubs…” We were very free since May 68, however I was taken aback by it, recalls d’Hugues. The song was ‘Je t’aime…moi non plus.’ A few months later several million copies had been sold. As for the grainy series of Jane and Serge, I did it for fun. I set them in the bath (empty!), barely lit by the room’s weak wall lights. I wasn’t sure that there would be a single picture on the film. » Jean d’Hugues
About the artist :
Jean
d'Hugues
To be born on Reunion Island, to spend the first 7 years of your life there, followed by 4 years in Madagascar, your whole life will remain impregnated with a sort of nostalgia for the tropics, the spicy countries which mark you forever. This is what happened to Jean d’Hugues whose return to France seemed terribly dull. So, as soon as the opportunity arose to set off again, he did it, but armed with his camera. Throughout his childhood he loved photography and played with his parents’ old folding Kodak. But the deciding factor was the discovery of “Autochromes Lumière”, the first commercialised colour emulsion, with its very impressionistic grain and vibrations. He had wanted to be a painter. He was a journalist (editor) for a few years and suddenly decided to drop it, to give his all to photography. Still with this taste for “grainy” photographs which developed almost a theory of the imperfection of the photo in him, he readily repeated, “A photograph shouldn’t reveal everything, it should leave a little room for imagination.” The photos of Jane Birkin are a good example of this. He always avoided Kodachrome with its glossy perfection. Jean d’Hugues has two parallel careers (he hates this word) in the end: travel photos without any ethnological pretension, and photos of artists, thanks to the writer Louis Nucéra, then a press attaché for Philips Records, who for the first time sent him to photograph a young man who was beginning to be talked about, a certain Serge Gainsbourg.