Portraits

A renowned photographer, Jean Mounicq is still a reference today for his work on Paris and Venice. A friend of Sergio Larrain, he had a short stint at the Magnum agency at the end of the fifties, before working for the women's press – notably ELLE – and thus portraying a whole generation of artists, writers, art dealers, women and statesmen, all at the height of their glory in the post-war years. Young people are not to be outdone; Mounicq's images propel singers and composers, dancers and couturiers, illustrators and designers, visual artists and concert artists, directors and actors to the front rows... the new idols of the moment.
Portraits is therefore an extraordinary collection of faces from the Thirty Glorious Years.

"The attention is always on the alert, the eye is assured, the setting up of the structures of the image almost innate, the selection of the elements of the set drastic. Consider the scene, its architecture, its openings, its constraints and its opportunities. Install the character in an order of space, establish him in the soothing seat of a chosen countenance or let him go about his outbursts of the moment. Measure the transparency of light, backlighting, shadows and reflections with your eyes. More often than not, try to control the lighting because you don't organize it. To consider the whole, to locate the objects, to dismiss the intruder, to banish the trivial, to suppress the pretty, to scrutinize the relevant, to choose the remarkable. Strike the right balance between shots. In the flood of the journalist's words, words and questions, the writer's replies and objections, the painter's jokes, the invitation to take up the sculptor's tool, the guard is down. There is a release of tension, a distraction of the body, a reflux of attention, a breach in the application to be published. »

Excerpt from the text by Françoise Denoyelle,
source: www.editionsdejuillet.com