LITTLE BLACK BOOK

Photography, like all art forms, is a quest for something. For oneself? For truth?
For provocation?

Twenty-five years ago, the liberated post-’68 generation could enjoy many pleasures without too much fear of unemployment, not yet of AIDS, and less than today of ideological and religious extremism.

In the ’80s, the imminent fall of the Berlin Wall and a Europe on the move would abolish some of the borders and archaic miseries that had been set up between peoples… We lived in the hope of a better world. A freer world.

My thirst for freedom, combined with a search for identity, led me to have my friends and acquaintances pose for me in the simplest of poses, detached from any aesthetic considerations.
“Little Black Book” (published by DTV), a collection of nude portraits of famous and unknown people, proclaimed the truth of the gaze, without complexes or complacency.

At a time when European agreement is struggling to survive, other threats, climatic or conflictual, are darkening the horizon.

Added to this is the return of the narrow morality of our elders.

My ever-vital quest for truth leads me to risk shock by showing this personal, unbridled but assumed work, the uncompromising work of my early years as a photographer.

Arnaud Baumann, Paris 2024