Jean-Marie Périer Retro­spective

A history of the Sixties

Jean-Marie Périer

Jean-Marie Périer is a photographer of happiness – even of melancholy as well, perhaps, if you view it in a more nuanced way. In his images and portraits of actors and singers of the 1960s, we admire the enduringly present archive of a dream from an earlier era: from Alain Delon to Mick Jagger, from the Beatles to Françoise Hardy. His ‘Retrospective’ is a wonderful gallery of remembrance, like a panorama of an era when everyone seemed to exude grace and a timeless elegance. His friend Patrick Modiano, winner of the Nobel Prize in Literature, said of Jean-Marie Périer: ‘After forty years, I don’t find the past in his photographs, but rather the present, that lack of care that screens out yesterday and today and allows us to experience simply “le vierge, le vivace et le bel aujourd’hui” (“the virginal, lively, beautiful today,” Stéphane Mallarmé). It is the privilege of youth, for which time does not exist.’ The retrospective at theInstitut français proposes that we allow the dream of this timeless youth to come to life again, in black and white or in colour.