Classic Series by Michel Comte

Michel Comte eschews cheap tricks and thrills and goes straight for that one decisive moment when a woman’s expression and posture reveal her true inner self in his photographs for The Classic Series. Michel Comte portrays his subjects with great emotion and intimacy, producing incomparable results in his high fashion photographs. The Classic series is a collection of artistic photographs featuring celebrity figures.

About the Artist:

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. Michel Comte is especially well known for his fashion photography and photographs of stars, such as Kate Moss, Sophia Loren and Mike Tyson. From the very beginning, one theme has surfaced repeatedly, namely women in Michel Comte’s photography.

Self-taught, Comte’s images of models and celebrities possess a unique sense of climax, as though everything has built up precisely to the moment he has captured. Often featuring women’s nude bodies, his photographs are highly dramatic, suggestive of a larger, often sordid, narrative. In one of his most famous photographs—an image of Giselle Bündchen from 1999—the model scowls as she inhales from a cigarette. Naked from the waist up, she covers her breasts with her arms; her eye makeup is smeared and dripping, while decadent diamond jewelry hangs from her neck and ears. Such expressive portraits are complemented by Comte’s ethereal landscapes, in which clouds disintegrate into the air and light flares accentuate bits of bright blue sky

Comte’s advertising clients include famous names such as Armani, Dolce & -Gabbana, Nike, Lancome, Revlon, Ferrari, Jaguar and Mercedes Benz.

In addition to portrait photography and fashion Comte has also increasingly moved towards photo-reportage and documentary. On photo assignments for the international Red Cross as well as his own Michel Comte Water Foundation he has travelled war zones and unstable areas in Iraq, Afghanistan, Bosnia, Sudan and Cambodia.