Books |
Marc Lagrange/Helmut Newton
By
Published: Jan 14, 2009
Category:
Art and Photography
1987. Tina Brown was trying to lure me to join her at Vanity Fair. I wanted to jump across the table and hug her, but I struggled to play hard to get. So she opened an envelope and handed me a dummy of a Vanity Fair cover — a close-up of Faye Dunaway, wearing dark sunglasses and a veil. Photographed by Helmut Newton.
“Your first piece for the magazine,” Ms. Brown said. "Want it?"
Ms. Dunaway was not easy, and I needed some guidance from the man who took her measure with his camera. Newton’s gone on to that place where fame doesn’t matter, but in my memory book, when his name comes up, I don’t think of his dramatic lighting or his sexually provocative poses. I recall how, as he spoke, I felt I could see what he was getting at.
And now here is Marc Lagrange, a photographer who bears the burden of being described as “the next Newton”.
I can understand why. Most of the pictures in his first book, Lust, are of models. Most of the models are nearly naked or tastefully naked; if naked, they are shaved, sleek, seductively fleshy.
“The environment and the beauty of women motivate me every day,” Lagrange writes. “But the urge to capture more beautiful and fascinated [sic] images drives me to the limit.” That caption is underneath a photograph of two women kissing as a man wearing a flashy sport jacket and gangster’s necktie gestures with a cigarette. What’s shocking about that image? Well, although he’s seated next to the women, he seems to be involved in an animated conversation with someone not in the picture — naked women kissing aren’t even a distraction. I find that kind of cool.
Lagrange has created a two-page homage to Newton that recalls one of my favorite Newton photographs. It’s of June Newton, his wife. Is it posed? It doesn’t seem to be — it comes across as a picture he just happened to snap at a restaurant somewhere in Europe. He and June have finished the meal, but their plates haven’t been cleared. She’s smoking a cigarette. He asks her to open her blouse. She does. She’s not wearing a bra. She inhales. And just then he takes…one picture. One very memorable picture.
Lagrange’s version is of a nude model, wearing pearls, alone at a table. It’s not bad — but the model is, to use his phrase, “an object of desire.” That was, to be fair, true of most of Newton’s work as well. That picture of June Newton, though, was much more; no doubt she’s his wife and lover.
But I can’t be too hard on Marc Lagrange. He’s young, and thus intent on making his name. Born in the Congo in 1957, he came late to photographer — his first career was an engineer. Fashion photography was his way in; art photographer is his preference. So he looks for dramatic settings. In one of his most striking pictures, he abandons his Antwerp studio to shoot his favorite nude model — think: Charlotte Rampling, with an even more expressive mouth — on a limb in a dead tree in a barren Namibian desert. And, inevitably, he falls into cliché, as when he tries to shock by recreating the Last Supper with mostly nude models.
If his vision is still overly influenced by Newton, Lagrange’s craft is flawless. These 157 photographs are large and precise. Though their subject is often sex, they’re not “dirty” enough for viewers who like art photography to be high-class porn. That is, there’s a chilly European feeling here; the women are posing, not waiting for the party to begin. The lust seems….academic.
Will Marc Lagrange break through to a style that, years from now, will make us describe some new photographer as “the next Lagrange”? Unclear. But of the photographers I can name who do this kind of work, he’s the one I’ll watch.
To buy “Lust”, by Marc Lagrange, from Amazon.com, click here.
To visit Marc Lagrange’s web site, click here.
To buy “The Best of Helmut Newton” from Amazon.com, click here.
To buy “Helmut Newton: Portraits” from Amazon.com, click here.
To buy “Private Property”, by Helmut Newton, from Amazon.com, click here.
