Highlights 2010, Part I. Depardieu & Giusti

Looking through my notes and bookmarks from the last months I decided to blog some of my 2010’s favourites. I’ll start with an amazing magazine cover and surprising editorial photography.

Jonas Unger photographed Gerard Depardieu for ZEIT Magazin. Design Mirko Borsche.

For me, this has been one of the best and funniest editorial shoots and cover of a german magazine in a long long time. Loved it from the beginning. Of course, without Depardieu and his willingness to do some funny, very “open” pictures photography like this wouldn’t have happened. But also a big compliment to Jonas Unger to shoot it like that. For sure, looks easier than it was. See all pages here.

Italian photographer Francesco Giusti did a great series on the members of SAPE, a group of men in Congo / Brazzaville who dress up every weekend like that:

Giusti says about this body of work:

“In Congo-Brazzaville SAPE is an old passion that has never stopped, not even during war years. At the arrival of the French in Congo at the beginning of 9oo, the myth of elegance was born among young people working for the settlers. In 1922, Andre Grenard Matsoua, well-known for his resistance to the settlers, was the first Congolese to come back from Paris well dressed like a true French “Monsieur”, and greatly admired by all his fellow citizens. Today’s members of the SAPE consider themselves as artists and are respected and admired by the whole community. The members of the SAPE take a touch of glamor into their humble environment with their refined style and faultless clothes. Everyone has his own repertory of gestures, marking him from all the others. Elegance is not the only important character. In fact, a true member of the SAPE is a gentleman and a pacifist. Every weekend the members of the SAPE, with their eccentric and amusing nicknames, gather in bars and fashionable dancing halls and parade in the streets among amused children and the applause of passers-by. These extemporized and spontaneous parades are the expression of a urban culture looking for new reference parameters and codes such as non-violence and elegance. They reflect the wish of young people in particular not to be left apart by society”

Beautiful subjects, well photographed. A pleasure to look at all the details.

Some more information here, the blurb book can be ordered for 29,95$ here.