Fun, fantasies, and 90s television sets. PLAY – a Philippe Jarrigeon’s personal vision of pop culture and modern aesthetics
PLAY, the GAME
The book’s title is significant to the photographer’s work and all the staff surrounding him on set. The wordplay refers to Jarrigeon’s ability to conceive and create images imbued with a sense of humor and sass, creating his own game. The game also represents the role that models on a set must play, posed to personify someone or something other than themselves.
The play described is also the very involvement that sees Jarrigeon engaged in his career within the fashion editorial world and the music and film world. «It is also the beginning of a video, a tune… a new GAME». The polysemic term PLAY summarizes the professional project of Jarrigeon himself. «In this very serious world, I try to be entertaining», these are the words of the photographer about the collection he has created.
The book composition
The review of Philippe Jarrigeon’s fifteen-year career in photography passes through the creation of this book. The editorial sphere is the inspiration for the first monographic work that refers to the artist. The design, clear in the cover, ensues from the magazines from which many of the images were taken. The sequence that makes up the 162 pages is a dive into spicy and colorful memories of Jarrigeon’s career. «PLAY, Philippe Jarrigeon’s first monograph, celebrates 15 years of a photography that is free of expression and deliciously deviant», the publisher describes it.
Revisiting the photographic archive, Jarrigeon, along with the artistic direction of Beda Achermann, decided to mix different genres of shots. Among those chosen are still life, portraits, landscapes, architectural or fashion photographs. RVB Books published the book, and it is constructed according to a rainbow of colors. Creating, as the Fisheye magazine quotes, what the artist calls a novel nuancier. Above all, the book’s creation stems from Jarrigeon’s desire to rethink his work at the intersection of fashion and music worlds.
Jarrigeon life and work
Graduated from ECAL-Switzerland in photography in 2006, he exhibited his work at La Galerie des Galeries, Paris. He also exhibited at the Fotomuseum Winterthur and the International Festival of Fashion and Photography in Hyères.
Based in Paris, he affirms his photographic work on creating still life productions and fashion services. From these experiences, he derives strong attention to detail and propensity to highlight the importance of the object in scenes besides people. Recurrent are scenes in which the human body acts as a background or a mechanical engineer to highlight accessories through movement.
He collaborated with Chanel, Dior, Hermès, Salvatore Ferragamo, Cartier, Chloe, Kenzo, Tiffany, Roger Vivier, Louis Vuitton. Also, numerous collaborations are with various fashion publications. In addition to this, he has collaborated in the music industry to create album-related artwork for artists like Snoop Dogg. Photography compliments the medium of film in the production of content that Jarrigeon has created for luxury brands. The humor inherent in Jarrigeon’s creations is also reflected in his recent commissioned work in the social networking field.
Pop culture and 90s style
«Cher Horowitz from Clueless coexisting with Carlotta Valdes from Vertigo; Wheel of Fortune, Women on the Verge of a Nervous Breakdown’s gazpacho, a TV show set mockup; all of this conversing together», points out the editor.
This is the journey the photographs collection offers along the way, interweaving images with a common denominator. The works’ inspiration starts from the glossy universe of television and cinema of the nineties.
The photo library allows the viewer to retrace the common imagery traceable to pop culture through photographs depicting current subjects. Visual rendering makes an estrangement perception, the awareness that there is something out of place in the image composition.
Zapping sensations
As Jarrigeon takes inspiration from the television universe, he puts together the book in a structure that gives the zapping feeling. This fruition mode, for instance, allows for the juxtaposition of contrasting elements that coexist. The contents range from glamor service with a luxury brand side by side with the shooting of common consumer goods. From peeled oranges resulting in a square shape on a red background to an editorial featuring Moschino’s Game Show collection.
«The sequence of images here has been thought out like a zapping session, where glam goes hand in hand with plain consumer good. The exceptional goes with the trivial, the beautiful with the ugly, the too serious with the too funny», reveals the editor. The settings and locations immortalized during the sets seem to capture fiction even more than film shots. On the other hand, young models try to imitate and bring back to the machine screen the great movie stars. PLAY, the publisher explains, represents a parody. «It is a parody of a logbook, the diary of a major Hollywood studio in the Golden Age years».
Philippe Jarrigeon
Born in 1982 in France, Philippe Jarrigeon is a photographer and publisher. Over the fifteen years of his career, he also has created content for various brands and fashion magazines. In addition, he is a professor at ECAL / Switzerland, where he earned his degree.
