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| Denis Piel |
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Denis Piel’s first photographic assignment left him well fed, if not rich. The job was to shoot a huge display of vegetables. “I was so poor, the client had to give me an advance to buy the vegetables,” recalls Piel.
“In the end, however, my picture was so bad that I didn’t even show the client. So I lost the job. But I ate the vegetables for two weeks.” Born in France and raised in Australia, Piel launched his career in Paris and London, but success eluded him. It wasn’t until 1979 that he got his big break, in the form of a telephone call from Alexander Liberman of Condé Nast. Soon Piel was shooting highly eroticized images for Vogue and other magazines. His legendary shot of Andie MacDowell, at right, was shot for Italian Vogue but actually ran in French Vogue Homme. “In fact, sensuality is the only thing that interested me in photography,” admits Piel. “My whole visual approach to photography is based on voyeurism. All my photographs were made to give the viewer the impression that he or she is taking part in a very private moment.”
By the beginning of the 1990s, Piel had virtually stopped taking pictures. He began making films and experimenting with new visual technologies, but he never achieved the kind of success he’d had with photography. “Today he lives in a mas sublime in the southwest of France,” says Naudet.
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