Pierre Molinier, lui-même - Essay über den surrealistischen Hermaphroditen

Pierre Molinier
Pierre Molinier, lui-même - Essay über den surrealistischen Hermaphroditen

Photographs: Pierre Molinier

Text: Peter Gorsen

Publisher: Rogner & Bernhard

90 pages

Pictures: 50

Year: 1972

Comments: Hardcover with acetate dust jacket, in a cardboard slipcase, 250 x 180 mm. Black titles embossed on the cover and spine. Black & white photographs. Text in german. First edition, 1972. Limited edition of 2000 copies. Selected as one of the "Seminal Photography Books of the 20th Century" in the "Book of 101 Books" by Andrew Roth. Slipcase a little used but copy in very good condition. Scarce collectible copy.

Some of the most hauntingly beautiful auto-erotic photographs ever taken by an artist/photographer who was truly way ahead of his time. The challenge Molinier poses is fundamental: Is he an artist or not? That is to say, his fetishism can be easily dismissed and its transcendent beauty denied. His is the work of someone who was, on the outside, a conventionally handsome and refined French gentleman. His unsettling work, which he produced for his own private pleasure, belies this mask and rejects it. Because he also created remarkable etchings and paintings, Pierre Molinier did not think of himself primarily as a photographer, but as an artist who fully realized his vision through photography. He shot carefully staged photographic tableaux that utilized mannequins and other props. The latter remind us of his obsession with sex as pure fantasy, as something which begins and ends as a fantasy that can never be achieved in reality. In the process, he created some of the most disturbingly beautiful photographs of the 20th century. Molinier proves that the erotic (as opposed to the pornographic) is ultimately about beauty (rather than about sex), an aesthetic (rather than a sexual) experience. Lucas Samaras, Helmut Newton, Robert Mapplethorpe, and Ellen von Unwerth, among many others, would not be possible without Molinier's pioneering example. A masterpiece. An absolute "must-have" title for Pierre Molinier and erotic art photography collectors. This title is a great photography book.