Q: When did you start doing nude photography?
Nicolas Guérin: In a really serious way in 2010, when I met Sheri. But the nude was my first subject when I started photography as an amateur. I was 15 years old, I was in love, and I wanted to keep a trace of this moment. The skills and requirements have changed, but the desire remains the same. To live my life, and to photograph those I love: my loves, my friends.
Q: These 3 books represent 12 years of personal work, why did you wait so long?
NG: Because these books are a puzzle of very intimate emotions for me, and they could not be done before, I was not ready. I was not ready. Before, I was in the moment of living and producing the images, without analyzing too much. These years passed very quickly, I worked for the cultural press, I traveled a lot. I went quickly from one project to another. Not only did I not have time to look in the rear-view mirror, but above all I did not see the point of it. It is only when I found myself alone that I understood the need to question myself on my trajectory, and to better understand my obsessions. I stopped running, I left Paris, I changed my life. The only constant is that I always photograph exclusively the people I love.
Q: Why this restriction?
NG: I don’t see it as a restriction at all, it is a major emotional choice. The heroes of my adolescence were filmmakers (Chaplin, Von Streinberg, Bergman, Antonioni, Godard, Sautet, Cassavetes, Allen…), artists who filmed the same actresses for a long time. We can add Visconti when he filmed Helmut Berger, the connection between desire and inspiration remains the same. I am fascinated by this idea, fascinated to see Anna Karina evolve under Godard’s gaze, Liv Ullamn struggle with Bergman, or Marlene Dietrch triumph with Von Sternberg. I like the idea of a theater troupe, and of loyalty. That you can go deeper into your work with the same teams. And above all it makes the work fun, and moving. Doing the umpteenth shoot with the same friend, it’s an opportunity to meet again, and to show each other that we care about each other, that the connection exists and that it resists time. A model I’m working with for the first time can’t give me what the one I’ve known for ten years can. I like the idea of portraying a woman as a puzzle, and over ten years. The women I photograph are strong personalities, complex, changing. In 3 hours of time how can I show all that? Over ten years it becomes possible, and exciting.
Some of the photographers I admire the most have had particular attachments to some of their models, such as Guy Bourdin with Nicole Meyer, Araki with Kaori or Roversi with Natalia Vodianova for example. And it’s no coincidence that the most beautiful images of Natalia Vodianova are those of Roversi. He knows her best. For me, nothing really beautiful is done without this long-term registration. There are of course exceptions, people with dazzling talent who are capable of everything and immediately. I am slow and faithful, I cultivate my attachments so that the links last. I need to focus my desire and my inspiration. I don’t just want to make one more picture, I want to photograph that woman at that moment. My inspiration is never abstract, it is embodied in these remarkable women, to whom I am faithful. We don’t photograph the women we love like we photograph others.
Q: Whether we like it or not, there are still people we love who disappear from our lives…
NG: Obviously, and this is my greatest tragedy, the one I can’t always face with dignity. Friends stay, more often than not, loves pass. Losing a love is an ordeal for everyone, for me it is a tragedy, and the negation of everything I wanted to believe in. My inspiration is obsessive, I have photographed Sheri for 7 years with the regularity of a metronome, and the end of our story marks the end of our collaborations. This adds to the pain of the end of a relationship the emptiness of the loss of inspiration.
My meeting with Alina allowed me to pick up the pieces, to refocus my desire and above all to experience a fascination again. She was not a model, but had danced a lot in her life, and dance is also about control and purity of line. My work changed after our meeting, I think it became purer. We decided to leave Paris, to travel for a long time, alone. My inspiration became monolithic. The scenery changes, the light changes, but the subject remains the same: Alina in Russia, Alina in Chile, Alina in Japan, Alina in Mongolia. This trip was a honeymoon, which both strengthened our emotional bonds, and allowed us to deepen our model/photographer collaboration every day.
Q: Is it possible to look with detachment at the faces and bodies of those you have loved and lost?
NG: Unfortunately, I have no neutrality on this but I would like to. It has been an ordeal to tackle the conception of this retrospective. I had to open files that I had voluntarily closed for years, and whose images-recollections revived still vivid emotions.
Between the moment I wanted to tell this story and the moment I was ready to do so, a year passed. For a long time, I went around in circles without a destination. I went back in time, and I remembered. For some parts, these are good memories, whether it’s with loyal friends, Pauline, Tessa, Klaudia, Lea, Marisa, Hea, all those who were there 10 years ago and are still there, it’s rarely a problem. But seeing the images of Sheri sick and thinned out, for example, still hurts me, yet they had to find their place in this timeline.
There are painful events in my life that I have long since digested, because I have had other joys since then. There is no more bitterness about it. Relationships with Sheri have normalized, it took a while, but she tells me how grateful she is for our years together and how sorry she is. We never saw each other again, but it will probably happen someday and I’ll be happy. There is a bond, an attachment to what we went through together, that I believe will last, and that is a comfort.
For the more recent images, it’s heavy for me. Talking about my travels and our artist residency with Alina is a flogging. I put too much of myself into it, too much hope too much energy to see these images pass without it tearing me apart. And I was still living in the house that was once ours when I started working on these books. It was like walking through a cemetery every day. I’ve always shied away from moments like this, and rushed events to shorten grief, but not this time. For once I faced it, in my own way, by making these books. I knew that if I didn’t do it now, I would never do it, and that it was 10 years of work that would remain forever at the bottom of a hard drive
Q: Whether we like it or not, there are still people we love who disappear from our lives…
NG: Obviously, and this is my greatest tragedy, the one I can’t always face with dignity. Friends stay, more often than not, loves pass. Losing a love is an ordeal for everyone, for me it is a tragedy, and the negation of everything I wanted to believe in. My inspiration is obsessive, I have photographed Sheri for 7 years with the regularity of a metronome, and the end of our story marks the end of our collaborations. This adds to the pain of the end of a relationship the emptiness of the loss of inspiration.
My meeting with Alina allowed me to pick up the pieces, to refocus my desire and above all to experience a fascination again. She was not a model, but had danced a lot in her life, and dance is also about control and purity of line. My work changed after our meeting, I think it became purer. We decided to leave Paris, to travel for a long time, alone. My inspiration became monolithic. The scenery changes, the light changes, but the subject remains the same: Alina in Russia, Alina in Chile, Alina in Japan, Alina in Mongolia. This trip was a honeymoon, which both strengthened our emotional bonds, and allowed us to deepen our model/photographer collaboration every day.
Q: Is it possible to look with detachment at the faces and bodies of those you have loved and lost?
NG: Unfortunately, I have no neutrality on this but I would like to. It has been an ordeal to tackle the conception of this retrospective. I had to open files that I had voluntarily closed for years, and whose images-recollections revived still vivid emotions.
Between the moment I wanted to tell this story and the moment I was ready to do so, a year passed. For a long time, I went around in circles without a destination. I went back in time, and I remembered. For some parts, these are good memories, whether it’s with loyal friends, Pauline, Tessa, Klaudia, Lea, Marisa, Hea, all those who were there 10 years ago and are still there, it’s rarely a problem. But seeing the images of Sheri sick and thinned out, for example, still hurts me, yet they had to find their place in this timeline.
There are painful events in my life that I have long since digested, because I have had other joys since then. There is no more bitterness about it. Relationships with Sheri have normalized, it took a while, but she tells me how grateful she is for our years together and how sorry she is. We never saw each other again, but it will probably happen someday and I’ll be happy. There is a bond, an attachment to what we went through together, that I believe will last, and that is a comfort.
For the more recent images, it’s heavy for me. Talking about my travels and our artist residency with Alina is a flogging. I put too much of myself into it, too much hope too much energy to see these images pass without it tearing me apart. And I was still living in the house that was once ours when I started working on these books. It was like walking through a cemetery every day. I’ve always shied away from moments like this, and rushed events to shorten grief, but not this time. For once I faced it, in my own way, by making these books. I knew that if I didn’t do it now, I would never do it, and that it was 10 years of work that would remain forever at the bottom of a hard drive
Q: Was the idea of keeping a kind of chronology in the images there from the beginning? What were the stakes of this retrospective for you?
NG: I learned photography on my own, from books. As a student, I made major sacrifices to buy monographs and start a library. Irving Penn, Helmut Newton, Richard Avedon, Sarah Moon, Guy Bourdin, Joel-Peter Witkin, Paolo Roversi were my teachers. I have a sort of cult following for their books. If you want to understand the motif in the work, there is nothing better than a monograph, as complete as possible, and with a chronological structure.
The challenge for me was to be able to identify the repetitions and variations that run through my work without my really paying attention, but that I easily perceive when I open my archives.
It’s a very autobiographical time-line of course, I know all the stories behind these images. A chronology made of phases, there is a long moment of discovery and erotic obsession, the experimentation with colors and flashes, it’s the moment when I meet Sheri, I move in a big studio in Montreuil, and I discover the film Polaroid. The question of the couple becomes central, I am surprised every day by the improbable couple that we form with Sheri, and I like more and more to observe and photograph the other couples. This is the moment when my private life starts to have a real impact on my images. Until then I was responding to press commissions.
When you look in your rear-view mirror, it’s quite easy to see that the periods of intense happiness, those moments of blindness when you are sure that things will last. And yet they don’t. But this moment has been. And the melancholy inherent in the photographic act comes from that. It is the past. No photograph shows the future, none even shows the present. Photography is that past that doesn’t want to be forgotten.
Q: There is a series in this book that is different from the others, “In the praise of shadow”, where sex is real.
NG: Yes, it was the spring of 2012, and Sheri was still living in NYC, we were seeing each other every couple of months, I missed her very much, I missed seeing her cum. I started this series on female pleasure at that time. I had been making portraits of the world of cinema for 12 years, I had never photographed any sexual act in my life, it is a subject far too important, in front of which I was backing away. The representation of desire, pleasure, physical love has always been a central issue in the arts.
Great filmmakers have avoided the subject all their lives, from Truffaut to Allen. In their films we talk a lot about sex, we are before sex, after sex, or the camera goes to the window, but they don’t show sex… And then there are the filmmakers who film sex, whatever their approach, there is Larry Clark, there is Spike Lee, Gaspard Noé, Lars Von Trier, Jane Campion, David Lynch… Those fascinate me because they approach the most intimate sphere, where sometimes the camera of others stops shooting.
I had been very marked by a meeting with Krzysztof Kieślowski, the author of The Decalogue when I was a student, he had explained to us that he had gone from documentary to fiction, because when you film a worker all day, she closes her door to you in the evening and you find her the next day, you never know what happens in the bedroom. Fiction allowed her to tell more intimate stories.
So I had this chance, this privilege to photograph women and couples at the moment of orgasm, and I won’t forget this experience. I already had a somewhat sacred relationship with the female orgasm, doing this work helped to hypnotize me even more. Sex, love, desire, it’s all about skin, merging together. It’s a beautiful photographic subject, but you have to find the right form for it. I wanted burning skin, living skin, and my only reference was Rembrant. He is the master of the pulsating skin. But photography is by nature more realistic, so I had to find a way to take a step towards painting, or abstraction, and leave room for the imaginary. We don’t see any sex in the series, we see love. I hope so!
Q: The hands seem to have a particular importance in your images, an almost mannerist preciosity…
NG: Yes, if there is another obsession that doesn’t go away, apart from the general subject which is of course the skin, it is my obsession with the hands. It was already unfortunately true in my portraits, as soon as I feel that my subject has a capacity to tell things through the detail of his hands, I end up directing only that. This comes from my love for painting, where the hand has always played an essential role. From Caravaggio to Fragonard, from Rembrant to Wermeer, to name but a few, part of the narrative is played out in the detail of the hands. It is sometimes the detail that contradicts the first impression of the image and gives it its deep meaning.
JM: What difference do you make between your work as a portraitist and your work on the nude?
NG: I don’t make any difference between nude and portrait. For me as long as there is a human in the image I see it as portraiture, with or without clothing. However, I make a big difference between images made to order, and those made for love. I have been photographing my friends on a recurring basis for the last ten years, and neither they nor I have ever made any money from it, on the contrary. But the images we make together tell our common story, what unites us. I think they know how important they are in my life, and that goes far beyond a friendship. Without these women, without the trust and time they give me, I would not exist as a photographer. They are the ones who make me want to see. They are the flesh and blood of my images.
Q : Do you feel that you photograph women the same way you did 12 years ago ?
NG: No, I hope not, that would be terrible. That would mean that my life is the same as it was 12 years ago, that it is all stagnant. The obsessions remain the same, the skin, the light, the lines. The means used and the method have changed a lot. Twelve years ago I had a studio at home to experiment: color, Polaroid, movement. We were isolated from the real world, there were flashes, assistants, teams. We lived in a bubble where the light was artificial. I loved it for 7 years.
When in 2017 I left to travel around the world with Alina, I really discovered daylight and understood that it gave me, on the one hand, infinite possibilities, and on the other hand a kind of “rapture”, an exaltation. I have an emotion more and more lively to observe and wait for the moment of light which makes everything more beautiful. It creates an urgency, we know that 5 minutes it will not be the same.
When we returned to France, we lived in a house facing the forest with large windows, and I have never plugged in my flashes again, for years. It means working light, without a team, fast, and with the obligation to be attentive to the present moment. This is not just a technical anecdote, it is above all a liberation. It is accepting once and for all that the quality of the image does not depend on its technical quality. The images are both more realistic and more intimate.
I am at one with my camera much more than before, it is never on a stand, I move in relation to the light without being constrained by the frontality of the studio. The studio is a theater, there is an obligatory axis, a frontality. In Mongolia or Patagonia I have 360 degrees around me to decide where I want to position my model in the light, these are moments of exaltation for me.
This method has become an addiction today in the work we have been doing with Noémie for 2 years. No sun, we chat while drinking tea by the fire, we wait. The sun appears, we are active, we make a lot of pictures. It hides and we return to the corner of the fire. In outside on the contrary, we get up at 5 am to be on the bridge of Rome at 6 am when the sun appears and we will not cross the police. We run after the sun… There is an almost poetic notion to all this.
Q: There are a lot of images with strings, where does this fascination come from?
NG: Originally, it was just to pay tribute to the work of ARAKI, whose direct style and honesty I admire. He uses ropes for their symbolic dimension (constraint and consent). These are not violent or suffering images, they are images of free women, who sometimes even prove to be sovereign. The ropes sacralize them more than they hurt them. I like the unique aesthetic that the strings can offer on the skin. There is a very sculptural aspect to a suspended body, the pressure of the strings amplifies the forms, modifies the lines of the body.
I believe that I am very dependent in love, that I sacralize the bonds of love excessively, and the ropes allow me to express that. Letting yourself be tied up by the other person is a kind of absolute trust, a consented vulnerability. One should not be afraid to tighten the ties.
I don’t use ropes in my private life and I am unable to tie a knot, but I like to see and photograph the ropes on the skin, and then the traces of the ropes on the skin. There is a narrative and an imaginary around the ropes, it questions to see a silhouette in kimono floating under a tree… The first time I saw an image of suspension it was an image of ARAKI of course, I did not even know that it existed and I did not know what to think of it. It is a theatricalization of the body, and an absolute abandonment of the subject. I find it moving that a model accepts to pose naked and suspended by ropes just to take a picture with me. It is a very strong gift of self.
Moreover I had the privilege to work each time with experienced and inventive shibarists, it is an art which is also beautiful in its gesture, and to see them working is also fascinating. In Japan, for the series with Sheri, the master of the ropes was Kinoko Hajime, I filmed her work before each installation, which I never do, because these hands that gravitate around the body by embracing it with the rope create a unique choreography, it is a real ritual, it is beautiful to see. It is an offering from the model. I feel a real gratitude towards those who go so far in the abandonment to make a photo with me. I admire that.
Like I admired Sheri, who shot a lot with Ren Hang, who became her friend. He asked her to do impossible things, in non-existent conditions of comfort, and she never said no. Because she liked his photos, because she considered him a great artist, she did everything she could to satisfy his most improbable visions. The freedom of Ren Hang’s photos is also the freedom given to her models. If the model is so confident, there are no limits to the imagination. Sheri posed with a dead pigeon in her mouth in the shower, or with a cherry tomato between her thighs, or hanging by her feet with her face surrounded by a plastic bag filled with water in which a goldfish was floating, or in the pond of the Montsouris park at night by 10 degrees after having crossed the gates with a ladder, and before being kicked out by the guard. Isn’t it beautiful? This capacity that photography can have to embark us in unreal situations. Think of the effort we put into just one image! The importance we give to this image afterwards, the memories we create…
Q: What are your upcoming projects?
NG: Books… I love books so much, that’s why I waited so long to do them myself. And if these ones were difficult to produce, the next ones will be much less so. I have learned a lot in the last 2 years. And I also understood and accepted that I needed others, that it was a collective work, in the noblest sense of the word. I lived this story, I put it into images, but I don’t know how to make a book. I don’t know anything about it. I started alone, then I tried to move forward in the face of publishers who, with good reason, told me “too long, too heavy, too expensive, not realistic”. Then I met Jan, who thought, structured, and found the form that would fit my story into a book. Of course these images tell my life story, but these books are as much his as mine.
And it took me a while to realize that he knew more about what would work in publishing than I did. The two volumes of UNDER THE INFLUENCE have been a process that has been borderline reasonable, we’ve done, redone, changed our minds, changed our minds and in total we have, I think, 93 versions of the project. Which is pretty crazy. Jan is a perfectionist, he likes to manipulate images, to find correspondences, breaks in tone. I thought I knew what I was doing, but when I saw him working I knew I wasn’t up to it. I learned a lot from him. And when we decided, a year after the beginning of the project, to devote a separate volume to my contemporary work with Noémie, I was ready to give him total control. I gave him 200 images, a chronicle of our two years of collaboration, and he proposed a sequence. We did three versions, the published version is the third. Working with someone who understands your obsessions, who sees your tics and limitations and turns them into strengths, is a huge opportunity.
The next book will probably be about 20 years of artist portraits, and I’m sure that one will be easier to produce…
On the chapter in CHILE with Alina & Marisa
“I know nothing about Latin America. I traveled a lot to Africa when I was a child, my father lived there for 25 years. Then I went to Asia because I was interested in this culture. My work has taken me to the four corners of Europe, to the United States, or to Australia, but I had only set foot in South America twice, and for stays of 48 hours. Terra incognita then.
An order for a hotel came to me.
It was to promote the Chilean landscapes from the Andes to Patagonia, through the Atacama desert. These are names that make you dream.
We went there in April 2018, during the austral autumn, with Alina and Marisa, and the rest of the team. It was a trip that was an essential step for me. I had never shot at altitude, where the silhouettes are naturally cut on the sky. I had never been on horseback, it took 3 days to get to the first rallying point. Everything was perfectly organized so that we were at the right place at the right time. The lights of the Andes and the desert were very bright in the morning, we had to get up before dawn to be on the shooting site before the sun was too brutal.
Contrary to the trip in Mongolia where we had no constraint other than our wandering, the planning here was tight and left little room for wandering. Everything was prepared in advance. The only unforeseen event was that the two models did not know each other, and that their level of experience and speed of action were almost opposite. Marisa jumps in front of the lens in a few seconds, and proposes faster than I know how to shoot, while Alina, who was just starting out at the time, was rather looking for small corners to hide.
I would have liked to make images of the two girls together but it was not really possible. There are two somewhat parallel journeys, one with Marisa and one with Alina, and I love both series deeply. Each one has its own way of inhabiting the world, of facing the sky and the light. One with all its solar strength, the other with the delicacy and grace that are hers.
After ten years of photographing naked women, often framed in bust or in American shot, I could make images in wide shot, with a wide angle, where the body was integrated in a spectacular landscape.
My years of portraiture had taught me to isolate my subject from the chaos and ugliness of the surroundings, here everything was beautiful. The sky, the rock, even the dead trees. The steaming geysers taught me to accept the most radical backlighting and to deal with it. I would have liked to stay 2 weeks more, we had not exhausted the power of the landscapes and the sceneries of this immense country which borders the ocean, and looks down on it. This is the destination that surprised me the most, I didn’t know much about it, and everything there dazzled me.
