Michel Comte is one of the greatest photo–chroniclers of the present day. His photographic oeuvre brings the most dissimilar human environments into contact, endowing the extremes of our planet with a human dimension. Viewers are exposed to parallel – and apparently unrelated – image worlds. Here, the bubbly champagne atmosphere of the jet set, the celebration of affluence, of glamour, but also of charm and beauty. There, the harsh realities of the contemporary world, the flip side of the coin: images from places we might prefer to ignore altogether, to forget about, photographs capable of giving pause, of leaving viewers bewildered, even enraged. Images of people deprived of the bare means of subsistence – and of others who never had access to them in the first place.
Any photograph that – like so many of Michel Comte’s – is reproduced millions of times inevitably constitutes a commentary of sorts. Simply by virtue of the mass diffusion enjoyed by his work, he interrupts the daily flood of images with his unmistakable signature style. The ubiquity of images and information has become a fact of life. There is no possibility of escape, even if we wanted to. How many images do we process in a 24hour period?
Beginning in 1981, Michel Comte has worked regularly for the American magazines Vogue and Vanity Fair. These jobs generated his first portraits of stars like Tina Turner, Catherine Deneuve, Michael Schumacher, and Mike Tyson. A number of these personalities, Sophia Loren for example, have been portrayed by Comte regularly over a 30 year period. Many of the shots of Loren were taken in the Engadin, a high Swiss valley Comte has chosen repeatedly for his portrait commissions. He has worked here for the past five years on a landscape cycle, its theme the exhilarating mountain world, in particular the element of water in its various states of aggregation.
Over the past three decades, Michel Comte has made a name for himself in a number of heterogeneous photographic genres. But from the very beginning, one theme has surfaced repeatedly, namely women. Accumulating over time has been a multifaceted collective portrait of the contemporary woman, one composed of first-class photographs located somewhere between glamour and intimacy, strength and vulnerability. His images of women are often characterized by supercool aloofness, but there are also warm and heartfelt images, and those marked by self–awareness and joie de vivre. In the end, Comte’s nudes stand as erotically charged metaphors for an image of woman in a state of change.
Whether a nude or a portrait, each Comte image exposes seemingly private moments. Based on perpetually novel pictorial inventions, he succeeds in creating highly individualized portraits. Transpiring here as well is an effect of reversal. Those Hollywood greats, models, top athletes, and pop stars – each normally seemingly trapped in the image that is imposed on him or her, namely the one expected by the public – are consistently portrayed by Comte outside of prescribed roles. These images represent moments of intimacy, offering viewers touching, almost personal modes of access to the individual portrayed. Doubtless, the gift of allowing his models, his subjects, to speak through their own images, of presenting them as they perceive themselves (or as they would like to) is one of Michel Comte’s greatest qualities. “It’s always a question of trust,” he says. When his subjects describe their interactions with Compte, their reports consistently focus on the experience of a personal dialogue. “These images reveal me as I really am.”
Christian Brändle
Christian Brändle is the President of Art Museums of Switzerland and Director at Museum für Gestaltung, in Zürich, Switzerland.
Michel Comte, Retratos
February 10 to May 14, 2017.
La Termica
Av. de los Guindos, 48
29004 Málaga
Spain
http://www.latermicamalaga.com/
Organized by diChroma photography.
