“Images are what interest me, not photos — it’s not quite the same thing. What’s more, I still don’t own a camera. The medium is of little importance — be it a pencil and paper, a stills camera or a video camera, it’s all the same to me. What counts is the final image.” -Jean Baptiste Mondino
That quote summarizes how Jean Baptiste Mondino works. Everything is about the image, the finished result. The prolific image-maker has worked for major fashion magazines and houses, made music videos for major artists and commercials for fashion houses.
A completely different profession
When Jean Baptiste Mondino found photography, it was very different. A friend got him a paid internship at ad and public relations agency Publicis. He designed layouts for ads. He spoke for English photographers who came to France to show their work.
“Whenever an English illustrator or photographer came over to show their portfolio, they always asked me to be present because I spoke perfect Cockney whereas they all stuttered away in bad Franglais,” he said.
SX-70 — original iPhone and Instagram
Mondino did not work as the other well-known shooters. He said, ” … the photographers at the time — Avedon, Penn, Guy Bourdin, David Bailey — all had their own studios and labs where they developed their own rolls of film and made their own prints. Which wasn’t at all my case. So I started out using a Polaroid — they’d just launched the SX-70 — which was a miracle, and which allowed me to train my eye in the same way people today do so with their iPhone and Instagram.”
Style evolution
Jean Baptiste Mondino had not seen the work of Helmut Newton or Guy Bourdin. His style and vision evolved from the girls his age. “For me, a girl of my generation was more likely to have short hair or to shave her head, because I hung out with punks in London and with the whole gang at the Palace in Paris and saw what the generation to come would be like.” He continued saying, “I felt — and I still do — a certain tenderness for women who are a bit rock chick and androgynous, which photographers who preceded me didn’t seem to feel, however good their work was. I was fresh — youth has that strength, it takes what’s been done and regurgitates it naively but with passion.”
Mondino got involved in filmmaking at M6 and MTV which gave him the opportunity to work with shooting and editing film. He notes that advertising jobs taught him art direction. He worked with John Paul Gaultier creating perfume ads.
He said, “For years, couture houses like Patou or Yves Saint Laurent would only bring out a perfume every 10 years. With Calvin Klein came the explosion — just by selling a few pairs of men’s briefs he managed to revolutionize the perfume industry, and the old model went up in smoke. All of a sudden perfume was democratized in a way it hadn’t been before.”
He said in a Numero article, “I knew Jean Paul, of course, I’d done photos for him, and we were given extraordinary freedom when we made that ad. The perfume had been entirely designed — scent, bottle, packaging, art direction — by Jean-Paul himself. Everyone was worried about the launch, except him and me. And they were all wrong, the perfume was extremely successful.”
Commercials
The 2014 J’adore Dior ad directed by Mondino and starring Charlize Theron showcases his vision for elegant and sensuous storytelling.
Music videos
Beyond his work in creating music videos for Prince, Bryan Ferry, Tom Waits, Madonna, David Bowie and others, he won big at the MTV Music Video Awards. He garnered Video of the Year, Best Direction, Best Art Direction and Best Cinematography for Don Henley’s “The Boys of Summer.”
Sources: Numero, Vman, Jean Baptiste Mondino.
More stories about inspirational photographers and their work are in On Photography.
