PLAY was nominated for the First Photographic Book Award at Paris Photo x Aperture 2022. An opportunity to revisit the work of this image-maker through this dynamic first monograph, a reflection of his fifteen years of photographic work.
PLAY is the epitome of Philippe Jarrigeon's unique vision of style. Seen as a parody of a major Hollywood studio, the first large-format book by the 40-year-old French photographer, who studied at the Ecole cantonale d'art de Lausanne (ECAL), invites us into the world of television and cinema in the 1990s. Here, sarcasm and fantasy are king. Between portraits, still lifes, landscapes, architecture and fashion, his motley imagery shows his attention to detail, his taste for diptychs and his particular sensitivity to the object. Philippe Jarrigeon plays with the polysemous term of the title, offering different levels of reading that encompass fifteen years of experience. In this mental and visual library, where "everything seems deviant", he summons Beetlejuice, the heroine of Vertigo, the praying mantis from Microcosmos and Cher Horowitz from Clueless. But he also invites Afghan greyhounds in the company of women on a baroque bed, while drawing his golden pistol, armed with a tube of lipstick.
POP CULTURE AND MODERN AESTHETICS
All the iconography here derives from the many clients for whom he has worked and from whom many images have been taken. Philippe Jarrigeon has collaborated with luxury houses (Chanel, Roger Vivier, Louis Vuitton...), music industry artists (Snoop Dogg...) and magazines (Vogue, Double, Purple, PIN-UP Magazine...). This adept of the pas de côté has always been "fascinated by the window display", as he puts it in an interview printed in a booklet included in the book. Here, he sublimates, pulsates and even exalts the diversity of his work, creating his own game with a sequence of images akin to television "zapping".
His career is a heap of eclectic, colorful creations where " glam cohabits with the consumer product, the exceptional with the trivial, the beautiful with the ugly, the too serious with the too funny ". In its chromatic progression, this first monograph, conceived with the help of Beda Achermann as artistic director, takes on the allure of a "roman nuancier". An invitation to (re)discover his work at the crossroads of worlds, filled with humor, quirkiness, sex appeal and "acid memories".
PLAY DE PHILIPPE JARRIGEON
RVB BOOKS, 2021 - 38 €
WWW.PHILIPPEJARRIGEON.COM
