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The fashion and beauty photographer talks about his European esthetic and his unorthodox approach to lighting.
ONE LOOK AT REMI REBILLARD'S IMAGES will tell you a lot about his personality. This Paris-born photographer, who now splits his time between New York and Miami, is a born adventurer. A world-class water skier who ranks second in his native France, he is invigorated by risk-taking, in both his hobbies and his photography.
Easily bored by "safe" visual concepts and lighting scenarios, he embraces all things unorthodox, eschews formulaic lighting and never shies away from tricky or experimental lighting if it can produce a memorable image.
His visual style can only be described as eclectic. Some of his images are edgy, surreal and futurist ic. Some a re" retrofuturistic," a quirky, oxymoron ic term that the 44-year-old photographer uses to describe a series of fashion images (including one image featured in this article) that recall the futuristic fantasies of the Sixties and Seventies, the era of moon landings, Mylar and Tang. Yet many of his other images are romantic, painterly and beautiful-infused with a European sensibility that recalls the photographer's Parisian past. The only constant in Rebillard's oeuvre-and his lighting-appears to be change.
Rebillard's love affair with light and celluloid began in 1985, when he started working as an art director for a famous French film director in Paris.
"During this time, I met a lovely girl, and I went to see her while she was doing a photo shoot on a French island in the Caribbean," he recalls. "The photographer there asked me to assist him, and when I returned to Paris, I bought myself a camera and started to shoot my own images. After I'd developed a small portfolio, I went to Milan and everything happened very quickly. I got my first magazine assignment, and then my second, and I signed on with an agent soon afterwards."
Since that time, Rebi I lard has been shooting regularly for editorial clients such as British and Italian Elle, British and German Cosmopolitan, Crazia and Arnica in Italy, Madame Figaro (a Parisian weekly) and a host of American fashion and beauty magazines. In 1992, he moved to New York but continued to travel between New York, Paris and...