Jean-Marie Périer
France • Born : 1940
"My Pop Years"

The magazine Vanity Fair observed that every time a celebrity passes away, Jean-Marie Périer’s phone rings, but describing him as a “photographer to the stars” is far too restrictive to do justice to the breadth of his talent. Périer has followed these artists from their early days to the height of their fame, and his photographs have helped define how several generations remember the 1960s pop and rock scene and beyond.

When Périer began his career in the 1960s, he was the same age as the artists he photographed and shared their carefree attitude. Johnny Hallyday and Mick Jagger were among were among the musicians whose paths crossed with his, along with other rising stars of the French pop scene, long before any of them became the towering icons we have since put on pedestals.

These days, Périer grows weary of being repeatedly brought back to his glory days of fifty or sixty years ago. He began his career in a time when people believed in a better future and now finds himself in another that would rather idealise the past than imagine what comes next.

In the second half of the twentieth century, singers, designers, and actors seemed to have a freshness, innocence, and creative energy that now feels hard to imagine today. Many look back on that period with a deep sense of nostalgia, as if it were the result of a rare alignment of circumstances. The photographs by JeanMarie Périer that we cherish from that time simply could not be made today. It is not that today’s photographers or artists are any less talented, but their work would never make it past modern-day publicists, whose cautious sense of taste would lead them to turn down such images before they ever saw the light of day.

Back then, the world of pop felt bright, playful, and uninhibited. That was what Périer loved about the rulebreakers who stepped in front of his lens. Speaking to Vanity Fair last year, he described his admiration for “the mad, yet elegant troublemakers” such as singersongwriter Serge Gainsbourg and actor Alain Delon, who were famous for living entirely on their own terms. “They did whatever they wanted,” he said, and for him that was the greatest freedom you could ever hope for in life.

His friend Erik Orsenna of the Académie Française describes how JeanMarie Périer’s “…kind, mischievous gaze frees us all from comfortable nostalgia. Périer gives us a vision that stays with us: the key to a world that moves without constraint, set free from time, coloured by playful irreverence, and shaped by his poetic eye and vivid imagination. His is a joyful world, where everyday kindness still matters. And in that world, he allows us to feel young again.” 

Labyrinthe.