***(Continuity Note: Please scroll down below this posting to view Chapter 1 first).
Camera Magazine lives! Hero’s of Photography : 1. Jean Paul Goude.
‘In our view, the original photographer is one who, by pursuing his aesthetic and narrative project to its ultimate limits, succeeds in drawing us into his own private universe, and, in his own way, touches on the universal. If only each portfolio, just like a novel or a film, while bewitching us with its beauty, could relate a story so powerful that it changes the course of our life.’
Camera International… Editorial Hiver ’87.
Camera International… Editorial Hiver ’87.
‘The Artist of the Muse’ Jean Paul Goude.
One of the most interesting of postmodernist photographers funded by commerce, the big corporations and in the end even the French government… Camera magazine drew my eye to his work nearly 20 years ago.I started writing this as a tribute to Camera magazine but the more research I did the more I realized that all those years ago Camera had turned me on to an incredible artist, which may be the biggest compliment you could give to an art magazine I guess, Alan Porter the Art editor had an eye for true greatness and brought it to a generations attention…so if this posting seems more about Goude than Camera; it is… but that’s only one of the reasons… the other is the article was the story of a young man with his life’s work in front of him… now Goudes story can be told with interesting hindsight I hope you find it as interesting to read as it was for me to research.
This is a man who created his own universe… his own kingdom… a Camelot… and then he breathed life into it’s queen with his powerful visual style… Grace Jones. The Muse. A visual archetype. An original. By Jean Paul Goude.
I've seen that face before...
Grace Jones. wikipedia.
Grace Jones was born Grace Mendoza on May 19, 1948, in Spanish Town, Jamaica.
Starting with Island records… where Chris Blackwell had the amazing good taste and foresight to see the explosion of Jamaican music that was growing out of Prince Buster and the Ska blue beat bands... If anyone foresaw the enormous effect Jamaica was going to have on modern rock music it was Blackwell, who set up a recording studio in Jamaica helping develop some of the reggae greats… Like Sly and Robbie.
Grace was a typically powerful Jamaican woman… who emigrated to ‘hip’ New York were she met Goude. Proud. Tough. Beautiful. The gays loved her flamboyant style …she had a series of dance hall hits from her first three albums… ‘Portfolio’… ‘Fame’… ‘Muse’ …becoming a gay icon… a new wave Marlene Dietrich.
At Studio 54 she became Andy Warhol’s muse. He shot a great number of pictures of her… immortalizing her as a fashion icon/ item with his small hand held flash camera which he carried everywhere. He took thousands of ‘snaps’ of the rich and famous New York art and society cognoscenti. Grace was a great favourite at the court of Warhol.
She was Warhols ‘fag hag’ companion at New York’s hedonistic… coke… ecstasy… amyl nitrate popper sniffing dance floor… dropping pills snorting coke and poppers was de rigeur at Steve Rubells new age Studio 54… the birth of the ecstasy M.D.A. driven disco ‘rave scene’ ...making hip New York disco art legends... and Andy was king… and Andy liked black… he discovered and had an intense relationship with the first really famous black post modernist black painter Basquiat while he partied with Trueman Capote and Jackie O... New York was the celebrity center of the world and ‘black’ was cool.
The infamous "Man In the Moon With a Cocaine Spoon’ wikipedia.
The infamous "Man In the Moon With a Cocaine Spoon’ a symbol of the hedonistic life style.
The original Studio 54 logo. wikipedia.
Studio 54, a look back...
The New York experience changed her. She grew used to using the moment and ‘the look’ and ‘attitude’ to foster a famous persona… Grace adopted a different New Wave style of music with a sophisticated hedononistic s+m androgynous club vibe…
releasing ‘Warm Leatherette’ (1980) and ‘Nightclubbing’ (1981).
‘With the change in musical style there also came a dramatic visual make over , created in partnership with stylist Jean – Paul Goude whom she eventually married and had a son with. Jones adopted a severe, androgynous look with square – cut hair and angular padded clothes. The iconic cover photographs of Nightclubbing and, subsequently, Slave to the Rhythm (1985) exemplified this new identity. To this day, Jones is known for her unique look at least as much as she is for her music..’ wikipedia.
releasing ‘Warm Leatherette’ (1980) and ‘Nightclubbing’ (1981).
‘With the change in musical style there also came a dramatic visual make over , created in partnership with stylist Jean – Paul Goude whom she eventually married and had a son with. Jones adopted a severe, androgynous look with square – cut hair and angular padded clothes. The iconic cover photographs of Nightclubbing and, subsequently, Slave to the Rhythm (1985) exemplified this new identity. To this day, Jones is known for her unique look at least as much as she is for her music..’ wikipedia.
Grace Jones in her 1985 Kieth Haring ‘styled’ performance at Paradise Garage, New York.
Grace Jones boldly played with sexual and racial stereotypes especially those to do with the black female body and it’s mystic sexuality. This was also one of Goudes obsessions… he produced a book called ‘Jungle Fever’…he was fascinated by the power of black sexuality and it is a recurring theme particularly in his early work.
The character archetype they created together was so successful Grace began being offered iconic movie rolls.
The character archetype they created together was so successful Grace began being offered iconic movie rolls.
Grace Jones as May Day in A View to a Kill
Grace’s work as an actress in a mainstream films first began with the fitting role of Zula, the Amazon in the 1984 film Conan the Destroyer alongside Arnold Schwarzenegger… and it was Goudes creation the studios where buying into, he had succeeded in turning his muse into an international star with a sense of ‘attitude’ and style over content…she’s no a great natural actress…but they booked her for her herself… not so much for the parts she played but for who and what she was… she’d become a living breathing art work… An icon.
Goude fascinates me because he even took this still photographers vision into film and made it rock there too… many photographers, myself included, made this jump… from stills advertising photographer to commercials director… successfully creating a genre that produced some interesting huge budget t.v. commercials… but most of us never did anything better than what we had already done in stills… whilst Goude’s ideas just seemed to get bigger and bigger and in his case everything had a breathtaking quality of origionality…
Grace Jones Citroen CX Car Advert...
Scary Carrie...
He never wasted money… in fact you can plainly see how creatively he gave real value for money, no matter what the budget. What’s interesting in this film is the Svengali like power of illustrator, designer, photographer, film maker and grand choreographer all rolled into one… but above all, in everything he does, there is an illustrators eye at work in the back… he has the ability to bring his illustration into life size 3 D… He was a new kind of artist… a multi media collagist.
We Love Jean Paul Goude...
We Love Jean Paul Goude...
With Goude you can see his stills in his films… and his films in his stills.
All the imaging of Grace the Amazon… Grace the Muse… Grace the black Archetype… is all born out of a creative womb hidden deep inside Goude’s head… it makes a lot of sense that he had a kid with her... David Bailey reckons… ‘you don’t have to sleep with the model… but it helps!’…Goude probably had to sleep with her to really understand her… then he used media to create his own Muse...
All the imaging of Grace the Amazon… Grace the Muse… Grace the black Archetype… is all born out of a creative womb hidden deep inside Goude’s head… it makes a lot of sense that he had a kid with her... David Bailey reckons… ‘you don’t have to sleep with the model… but it helps!’…Goude probably had to sleep with her to really understand her… then he used media to create his own Muse...
Grace Jones - Slave To The Rhythm Blooded - 1985...
There is something profound in all this mythic archetype building… echoing fables of old… the mythological histories of man himself.
Stories that are not just fairytales… Tales of the Greek tragedies for example… they live on and on for a reason… they are lessons in understanding ‘mankind’ …the core identity… Id… Like the story tellers of ancient times who blow everlasting life into mythic characters that are archetypes of the soul. A good analogy in fact for Goudes photography and life.
Stories that are not just fairytales… Tales of the Greek tragedies for example… they live on and on for a reason… they are lessons in understanding ‘mankind’ …the core identity… Id… Like the story tellers of ancient times who blow everlasting life into mythic characters that are archetypes of the soul. A good analogy in fact for Goudes photography and life.
Goude used his art to breath life into whatever it was Grace was to become… doing much more than just taking pictures… though I suspect the picture making process was fundamental in defining his basic design for his Muse… Grace maybe in her sixties now… but the ‘Grace Jones’ they created will live forever in her music and her films…
I want to cover what Camera magazine prophetically wrote about Goude all those years ago.
This article was what turned me on to Goude in the first place… giving me an actual example of how far we can extend the boundaries of our work as photographers.
I could have read the text and regurgitated it myself as a copyright safe section but that would be doing a disservice to Edgar Morin the writer who wrote the piece.
I want to cover what Camera magazine prophetically wrote about Goude all those years ago.
This article was what turned me on to Goude in the first place… giving me an actual example of how far we can extend the boundaries of our work as photographers.
I could have read the text and regurgitated it myself as a copyright safe section but that would be doing a disservice to Edgar Morin the writer who wrote the piece.
I can’t write like this man can so I wanted you to be touched by his words and how he constructs his ‘profound’ literary vision of Goude. What’s fascinating is the strange symbiotic relationship between his style of writing and the images themselves… even though the words and images come from different genres… This juxtaposition is the genius of Allan Porter… Camera’s brilliant editor… whose work has all the polished simple sophistication of a pre digital world… It’s truly ‘elegant’ art direction.
This article and it’s style are a good insight into the literary elegance of creativity in those days.
And one thing Camera always did was to front line the war of ‘is photography art?’
Not only using brilliant design and pictures but the writing too was always way above the stuff you found in other photo magazines which were usually technical manuals with some nudes thrown in… still are… so let the poetry of Morin’s writings wash over you with the pictures…adding an additional ‘focused’ dimension to understanding the mind of the man who created Grace Jones.
Jean Paul Goude. A portfolio. Camera International ‘Ete ’88...
‘What was a figure in a dream becomes a myth. And the living, lying myth becomes destiny and achieves being’
Jean Paul Goude has, on his mother’s side, traces of Queens and Broadway culture in his veins. But he is not a New Yorker solely by ancestry. This also came about by attraction, as it has done for other young French people fascinated by the City of Cities, who since the sixties, have become New Yorkers in New York. But Goude is more New Yorker than the New Yorkers themselves, rooted as they are in their respective neighbourhoods, communities and childhood districts. It is the young arrivals from Europe who dart about between the different New Yorks… Greenwich Village, Harlem, Bronx… mingling and blending into a city of such incredible variety as to be a microcosm of our World. The combined elements making up New York is an incitement to an art characterized by juxtaposition, assemblage, patchwork, chance encounters, neo realism (In New York, surrealism is a vision, a passion, a spontaneous ethos that really does exist; it pervades everything , the streets, the facades, the bars, the shows, the daydream heads that brush unseeing against each other in the subway)… ‘the finest ordering of things may resemble a heap of hastily – assembled garbage.’ Heraclitus.
That is the unconscious principle behind New York art.
Goude is an artist whose art took shape in New York.
He carried on elsewhere, in different places, but he is a post New York artist.
‘He achieves his fantasies’, they say. But he achieves them with drawing, design, photography, materials, dressing, makeup, flesh, body movements and most importantly, with the human body itself. His work embraces artefacts and living beings. He uses the ephemeral to produce the ephemeral, but the printed impression of this ephemerality becomes enduring, causing to be consigned to museums what started out as the antithesis of conservation. But perhaps this is because the word museum meant Temple of the Muses ? Indeed, Goude’s most remarkable works issue from the exaltation of his Muses, transfigured through his work into Myths.
Goude has transfigured women who, in return, have transformed Goude. They already exuded an extraordinary radiance themselves. They were already somehow divine.
We must not imagine that Goude was their Pygmalion, civilizing uncouth beauties by refining them. On the contrary, he revealed their wildness and animality at the same time as he rendered sacred and exalted their bodies and exquisite faces.
The Pygmalion of legend was a king of Cyprus who carved a statue of a woman whom he married when Aphrodite brought the statue to life. Goudmalion sculpts a woman he espouses, but his sculpture is not a statue of stone; and it is more than a statue of human flesh endowed with soul, for he creates a mythical figure wherein the living substance, without ceasing to live, is transfigured into a creature of dreams and legend.
This article and it’s style are a good insight into the literary elegance of creativity in those days.
And one thing Camera always did was to front line the war of ‘is photography art?’
Not only using brilliant design and pictures but the writing too was always way above the stuff you found in other photo magazines which were usually technical manuals with some nudes thrown in… still are… so let the poetry of Morin’s writings wash over you with the pictures…adding an additional ‘focused’ dimension to understanding the mind of the man who created Grace Jones.
Jean Paul Goude. A portfolio. Camera International ‘Ete ’88...
‘What was a figure in a dream becomes a myth. And the living, lying myth becomes destiny and achieves being’
Jean Paul Goude has, on his mother’s side, traces of Queens and Broadway culture in his veins. But he is not a New Yorker solely by ancestry. This also came about by attraction, as it has done for other young French people fascinated by the City of Cities, who since the sixties, have become New Yorkers in New York. But Goude is more New Yorker than the New Yorkers themselves, rooted as they are in their respective neighbourhoods, communities and childhood districts. It is the young arrivals from Europe who dart about between the different New Yorks… Greenwich Village, Harlem, Bronx… mingling and blending into a city of such incredible variety as to be a microcosm of our World. The combined elements making up New York is an incitement to an art characterized by juxtaposition, assemblage, patchwork, chance encounters, neo realism (In New York, surrealism is a vision, a passion, a spontaneous ethos that really does exist; it pervades everything , the streets, the facades, the bars, the shows, the daydream heads that brush unseeing against each other in the subway)… ‘the finest ordering of things may resemble a heap of hastily – assembled garbage.’ Heraclitus.
That is the unconscious principle behind New York art.
Goude is an artist whose art took shape in New York.
He carried on elsewhere, in different places, but he is a post New York artist.
‘He achieves his fantasies’, they say. But he achieves them with drawing, design, photography, materials, dressing, makeup, flesh, body movements and most importantly, with the human body itself. His work embraces artefacts and living beings. He uses the ephemeral to produce the ephemeral, but the printed impression of this ephemerality becomes enduring, causing to be consigned to museums what started out as the antithesis of conservation. But perhaps this is because the word museum meant Temple of the Muses ? Indeed, Goude’s most remarkable works issue from the exaltation of his Muses, transfigured through his work into Myths.
Goude has transfigured women who, in return, have transformed Goude. They already exuded an extraordinary radiance themselves. They were already somehow divine.
We must not imagine that Goude was their Pygmalion, civilizing uncouth beauties by refining them. On the contrary, he revealed their wildness and animality at the same time as he rendered sacred and exalted their bodies and exquisite faces.
The Pygmalion of legend was a king of Cyprus who carved a statue of a woman whom he married when Aphrodite brought the statue to life. Goudmalion sculpts a woman he espouses, but his sculpture is not a statue of stone; and it is more than a statue of human flesh endowed with soul, for he creates a mythical figure wherein the living substance, without ceasing to live, is transfigured into a creature of dreams and legend.
My sentiments about Goudemalion’s mythology offerings could not be better expressed than in these words of George Bataille ‘ such is life …What was but a figure in a dream becomes a myth. And the living, lying myth becomes destiny and achieves being.’…
‘The Sorcerer’s Apprentice’ would be a fitting description, in its literal sense for Jean Paul Goude.
Edgar Morin.
‘The Sorcerer’s Apprentice’ would be a fitting description, in its literal sense for Jean Paul Goude.
Edgar Morin.
C.V.: Jean Paul Goude was born in 1940 at Saint-Mande, of an American mother and a French father. He began a career as an illustrator for the Printemps department store in 1964. In 1968 the editor of Esquire invited him to do work for a special edition of the magazine, and two years later he settled in New York where he would become Esquire’s art director. In 1976 he moved to the New York Magazine. He met the singer Grace Jones in 1978 and became manager and art director for her shows, including a London one-man-show of which a movie was made in 1983. Camera magazine.
I leave you with this film clip as a final brilliant appraisal of Goudes work… this clip looks and feels like labour of love… a fitting tribute to a great postmodernist artist.
I leave you with this film clip as a final brilliant appraisal of Goudes work… this clip looks and feels like labour of love… a fitting tribute to a great postmodernist artist.
Jean Paul Goude – Retrospective...
