Milla Jovovich, 1999
English text
Interview by Philip Utz, portraits by Jean-Baptiste Mondino
What do you mean, “never”?
Photography never interested me.So why on earth did you become
a photographer?
Images are what interest me, not
photos – it’s not quite the same thing.
What’s more, I still don’t own a cam-
era. The medium is of little impor-
tance – be it a pencil and paper, a
stills camera or a video camera, it’s
all the same to me. What counts is the
final image.Do you remember the first image
that struck you?
Yes, it was almost certainly a Christ
on the cross.Sorry, what did you say, Christian
Lacroix?
Oh help, I say “Christ on the cross”
and he hears “Christian Lacroix.” Who
I like a lot by the way, but clearly I’m
dealing with a screaming fashion
queen here, this isn’t going to be
easy. When I was a child, my mother
had the very good idea of signing me
up for the choir in the local church in
Aubervilliers. To give you a bit of
background, I was born in 1949, after
the war, to a family of Italian immi-
grants. In my childhood there were no
newspapers, TV, images, statues- that pushes me to widen my hori-
zons, to see what it’s like elsewhere.
And I’m not at all nostalgic – I’d be
incapable of telling you, for example,
that there were periods of my life that
were better or worse than others, not
even when I went bald, which is say-
ing something.
I noticed that you’ve very rarely
taken part in exhibitions during
your ca re e r...
I never did so until Babeth asked me
to show my work for Numéro at the
Studio des Acacias.What about your 2012 exhibition
of photos of cows at the Milk gal-
lery? That counts for nothing?
Thank you for reminding me of it! It
was a series of photos I’d done for
Philippe Starck for the Hudson Hotel
in New York, right in the middle of the
mad-cow crisis. Which is where the
idea came from to photograph bo-
vines coiffed with rather large couture
hats. Especially since I knew
I wouldn’t have any personal copy-
right issues with cows, so I could
exhibit them as I saw fit.At what age did you start getting
interested in photography?
N eve r.NUMÉRO: Like me, you’ve been
working with Numéro since the
magazine’s launch, over 20 years
ago. How on earth have we man-
aged to hang on so long?
JEAN-BAPTISTE: Well isn’t that a
nice way to start the interview?
Listen, we’ve absolutely nothing to
complain about, we’re talking about
Numéro after all. There’s a real sort
of resistance to this magazine, which,
moreover, unites in one cover all the
ingredients I like.What exactly do you mean by
“resistance”?
A real resistance with respect to an
era that worships at the altar of ce-
lebrity. Numéro has remained a fash-
ion magazine in the noble sense of
the term, and has kept fashion as its
central concern.How did you meet our delicious
editor-in-chief, Babeth Djian?
I met her in the 1980s, at a time when
we worked together on many shoots
for magazines such as The Face,
Glamour, American Woman, etc.
I didn’t get the chance, alas, to work
with her on her magazine Jil, but she
was part of a group of young creative
fashion editors who mattered, along-
side Carine Roitfeld.How have women’s magazines
changed since then?
Things change, the world moves on
and the main quality of fashion is to
constantly be evolving so as to both
reflect and anticipate the Zeitgeist.So where did you actually meet
Babeth for the first time?
I don’t remember, I’m too old.You never slept together?
No. I guess I’m not her type.How the devil did you manage not
to be undone by the #MeToo
movement, which has put an end
to so many other famous pho-
tographers’ careers?
I don’t use my camera as an exten-
sion of my penis.What was it like growing up in the
disadvantaged 93 banlieue?
When you grow up somewhere, you
don’t know what it’s like elsewhere,
so you don’t fantasize about things
you don’t know. I’ve always found
wherever I was living interesting, but
at the same time I was never satisfied
with where I lived, no more today than
when I was in my housing estate in
the 93. I’ve always felt a sort of dis-
satisfaction – or curiosity perhapsClose-up
MONDINO
SHOOTS
NUMÉRO
Johnny Depp, Lou Doillon, Karl
Lagerfeld, Robert Pattinson, Björk
- they’ve all posed for French
photographer and director Jean-
Baptiste Mondino, who recently
exibited 20 years’ of his outstanding
work for Numéro. Insatiably curious,
he takes inspiration from the energy
and beauty of the exceptional
designers, artists, musicians and
models who define our times,
subliming their singularity into
unforgettably iconic images of
contemporary pop culture.