MICHEL COMTE

Michel Comte Biography - Michel Comte is one of the greatest living photo–chroniclers. Michel Comte's photographic oeuvre brings the most dissimilar human environments into contact, endowing the extremes of our planet with a human dimension. Viewers of Michel Comte's photos are exposed to parallel – and apparently unrelated – image worlds. Any photograph that – like so many of Michel Comte’s – is reproduced millions of times inevitably constitutes a commentary of sorts. Simply by virtue of the mass diffusion enjoyed by Michel Comte's work, he interrupts the daily flood of images with his unmistakable signature style. The ubiquity of images and information has become a fact of life in Michel Comte's pieces.

No other photographer spans such thematic extremes in his oeuvre more than Michel Comte. This autodidact launched Michel Comte into an advertising campaign for Chloé / Karl Lagerfeld. This job was quickly followed by commissions from internationally known labels such as Armani, Dolce & Gabbana, Gap, Gianfranco Ferré, Nike, Ungaro, and Versace.
Since 1981, Michel Comte has worked regularly for Vogue and Vanity Fair. These jobs enabled Michel Comte's first portraits of stars such as, Tina Turner, Catherine Deneuve, Michael Schumacher and Mike Tyson. A number of these personalities, Sophia Loren for example, have been portrayed by Michel Comte regularly over a 30 year period.

Over the past three decades, Michel Comte has made a name for himself in a number of heterogeneous photographic genres. But from the very beginning, one theme has surfaced repeatedly, namely women in Michel Comte's photography.

Jeremy Irons

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