2010, from Autobiography, in my iPad application Horvatland
One of my first commissions for Jardin des Modes struck me as an opportunity to ‘extend the boundaries of fashion photography’. I suggested that we shoot at night, in Les Halles, the wholesale food market that in those days was still located in the city-center and therefore called ‘the stomach of Paris’. Straight away, Moutin thought the idea was “géniale”. But it turned out that the available light was too poor to show the details of the dresses and that the models were being constantly jostled by the coming and going of the market’s burly workmen (known as ‘les forts des Halles’), too laden with their beef carcasses to think about anything except the shortest way through. I thought it better to retreat to a bar called Le Chien qui fume (‘The smoking dog’) whose owner gave us the go-ahead. The patrons were either forts des Halles, too tired of their hard work to pay attention to us, or tramps, too drunk to care. I settled for having the girl rest her elbows on the zinc bar (luckily she was a pro, who had well enough understood what I wanted, to give up on dramatic poses and keep her head slightly lowered, with a vague smile on her face, as if she had had one too many). The scene could have taken place in ‘reality’, or at any rate in what magazine readers would consider ‘Parisian reality’. The light was a little dim, the film had to be overdeveloped and the photos turned out grainy – but this only made them look more believable. Moutin was over the moon about them. Le Chien qui Fume has now become a huge brasserie and one of these shots is on its walls.
1957, Paris, for Jardin des Modes, at "Le Chien qui fume"
