Olivier Zahm - Jeanne Damas on a houseboat, Paris, October 2010
Olivier Zahm
Jeanne Damas, Paris, 2010
Silver gelatin print
14½ × 17½ inches (36.8 × 44.5 cm)
Edition of 3
Captured aboard a houseboat on the Seine in October 2010, this photograph by Purple founder and editor Olivier Zahm pictures a young Jeanne Damas — then at the threshold of what would become one of the more quietly mythologized careers in contemporary French style — in a moment of unguarded ease. Zahm, long committed to an erotic and literary documentary mode indebted to Guy Bourdin and Nan Goldin alike, brings to the image the frank intimacy that has defined his practice across three decades: the frame neither performs nor explains, it simply holds. Paris in autumn, interior light, the low rock of the water below. The result is less fashion photograph than a still from a film no one made.
Framed. Edition of 3.