ME with Ai WeiWei and Maurizio Cattelan, 2016. Copyright Jean Pigozzi
Photographer and philanthropist Jean “Johnny” Pigozzi was a student at Harvard University in 1973 when he spotted actress Faye Dunaway at a party and asked to take a picture with her. “Every year the Hasty Pudding, a Harvard theater club, invites a famous movie star [to visit],” Pigozzi explained to VICE. “Everyone wanted an autograph, but I felt autographs can be fake.”
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So when Dunaway said yes to a photo, Pigozzi did something extraordinary (for the time). He stood beside her, held his arm forward, pointed the camera back at the two of them, and pressed the button—snapping a selfie with a celebrity decades before the invention of Instagram. “Now, you have an iPhone and a screen and you can look at yourself and take many photographs. But when I started doing selfies, I only had the chance to take one picture, so I had to get it right,” Pigozzi said.
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After college, Pigozzi became an insider in a rarefied world. In 1974, he exhibited photographs in the Musée d’Art Moderne in Paris. Soon after, his close friend Bianca Jagger helped him land a small part in a film (though it was never released). One night, Jagger invited Pigozzi to an intimate dinner with Liza Minelli, who told him about a new nightclub in New York called Studio 54. Nights at the club yielded selfies with celebrities like Grace Jones, Andy Warhol, Helmut Newton, and Ai Weiwei. Then in the 80s, Pigozzi began throwing lavish pool parties at his house in Cannes and turned his lens on his guests, capturing candid moments between famous friends.
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Ahead of an exhibition of Pigozzi’s work at IMMAGIS Fine Art Photography in Munich from June 22 to August 4, VICE caught up with the photographer to gripe about modern selfie culture and chat about using a camera to collect mementos of his glamorous life.
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Naomi Campbell, Villa Dorane, Antibes, 1993. Copyright Jean Pigozzi