69 Année Érotique
Jean
d'Hugues
About this photograph :
69 Année Érotique
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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.
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