The publishing house Assouline collected 200 of the most beautiful images of the photographer Francis Giacobetti in an art book published this October. He was the flagship photographer of the monthly magazine Lui since its creation in 1963, not only reinventing the nude, but also the whole artistic process of shooting, both in video and in photography.
Drops of water on bronzed skin. The sun high directly overhead, on an empty beach, or beside a glittering swimming pool. Young women, as lovely as goddesses, stretch out languidly—most often wearing nothing but a pair of polarized sunglasses , a necklace , or a cigarette between their lips—displaying themselves in all their glory beneath the tropical sky. And beneath the gaze of world-renowned photographer Francis Giacobetti.
These women are “stark naked”—or more precisely, stripped to the skin—for the exposed skin of their shamelessly naked bodies reflects like a mirror in which the photographer seems to invite us to gaze upon our own desire. Here more than ever, as the French proverb has it, love is a question of the skin. Love—and photography too. “Being photogenic is not a question of beauty in the usual sense,” says Giacobetti. “It’s primarily about a face and skin that absorb light. [Film star] Sylvia Kristel had the kind that took in light superbly well: You had the impression that there was a candle lit within her.”
In another image, a woman stands, facing us: Although we see only her nude torso (the origin of the world according to Giacobetti?), she also exhibits, with great pride, her golden skin and the contours of her breasts. The photographer does not, however, owe his pictorial success solely to “the sun,” his “great friend,” as Brigitte Bardot—who also undressed for his lens—sings in her 1963 hit song La Madrague. Throughout his entire photographic œuvre, Francis Giacobetti bathes skin in light itself, just as the sun leaves its mark on tanning bodies. The flesh of his dream-bodied women sparkles on the beaches of the Bahamas, the backdrop of so many Giacobetti photos shoot over the course of twenty-five years for Lui magazine, as well as for the images he created for the annual calendars issued by the Pirelli automotive company’s United Kingdom subsidiary in 1970 and 1971.
Giacobetti is, moreover, only one of three photographers, together with Richard Avedon and Peter Lindbergh, ever to receive two back-to-back commissions to shoot for this venerated annual institution — “the first calendar that was a bit more thoughtful than the others,” according to the photographer. Nonetheless, the skies in these photos of sunlit freedom are darkened with threatening clouds. What drama is being played out in these images? That story, seemingly avant-garde in our once-more conservative world, played out in the 1960s and 1970s and was called the “sexual revolution.”
Jérôme Neutres
Jérôme Neutres is an exhibition curator, an author specialized in arts and the executive chairman of the Musée du Luxembourg. This text is excerpted from the book Giacobetti, published by Assouline.
Giacobetti
Published by Assouline
85€
