Our edition of the day is entirely devoted to Jean-Marie Périer. Here is the fifth part that looks back to the 1990s of the French photographer.
When I look back, I realize that everything in my life changed every ten years, work, location, sometimes wife and even countries. It’s really a luxury once you realize that you live only once. I love making pictures, then movies, and the idea of living my last hundred yards writing books is really exciting. Because in fact, nothing really mattered since I never became a musician. This feeling of failure always pushed me to act first and think after. Happily, because if I had thought before I wouldn’t have done anything. Finally, it’s better to succeed in failure than to fail in success.
That’s how it took me twenty-four hours to decide to leave France for America and spend the next ten years between New York and Los Angeles shooting commercials. Living there was an old dream. But one day, I realized that, may be, it was the American movies that had created the dream.
And one day, on the terrace of my West Hollywood apartment, I remember, I had the blues when suddenly my sister Anne-Marie called me from Paris. « I have a magazine », she told me. (She was the editor in chief for Elle Magazine) « You need to come back to photography »
Good bye America and here I am again in the Filipacchi group. But now it is a huge machine running over a hundred publications. Régis Pagniez is now in New York. Still art director for the group, with the same scissors in his hands, he’s working on American publications (Elle, Look, Georges, etc …).
Régis has been the man who secretly changed the style of the French press during fifty years. It would be worth it to dedicate a retrospective to his work. What are they waiting for in Arles?
(Photo No 1)
Thanks to Daniel Filipacchi and to my sister, I immediately find the same freedom than in the sixties.
(Photo No 2)
But in the nineties, the new rock-stars are the designers. The rock-stars of the sixties have now become bourgeois, they are married, have families, children, and now it’s the fashion designers who have the money and the imagination to invent their lives. Nobody lives like Yves Saint-Laurent, Karl Lagerfeld or Jean-Paul Gaultier. Then, with my friend, the art director François Baudot, I had the opportunity to create a series about the French designers.
(Photos of the creators)
Jean-Marie Périer
