Picture the scene. It’s 1965, somewhere in the Paris suburbs. Richard Schroeder is 12 years old. A friend’s older brother leads them into his bedroom. With a solemn, almost liturgical gesture, he places a 45 rpm on his turntable and drops the needle. The opening notes of “Satisfaction” by the Rolling Stones explode into the room.
For the teenager, it’s a blast. An intimate earthquake. Keith Richards’ riff like an uppercut to the solar plexus, Mick Jagger’s voice crying out his own unsatisfied desire. “Those three minutes and 43 seconds changed my life forever,” the photographer confides 50 years later in moment parfait, his first monograph just published by Éditions Odyssée.
“It’s wild, it reeks of irreverence and voluptuousness, it seems almost dangerous, but it’s terribly exciting.” His mind is made up: rock will be part of his life. In the wake of the Stones, an entire cultural continent emerges: cinema, literature, politics, from Godard to the Beat Generation, from Albert Cohen to Andy Warhol and rock criticism. “Without going far, you can really travel!” he observes.
Young Richard Schroeder devours, absorbs, ingests. He can’t play an instrument but senses that his eye “takes pleasure in looking at the world and those who inhabit it.” Fate does things right: his godfather is a photographer. “That helps,” he says. “You know what it’s like to hang around a fashion photography studio when you’re still prepubescent?”
Between the sink and the bathtub of the family bathroom transformed into a darkroom, Richard Schroeder becomes a photographer. “With the rigor that only true slackers know how to deploy,” he notes. At 20, he replaces his godfather’s assistant. “You’d think luck was my friend.” Three years later, he goes solo. And at 30, he opens his own studio.
“Being able to experiment, take a shot at any hour of the day or even night, be ready when she or he comes to pose before my lens,” he recounts. “The Clash or Talking Heads on the speakers, cigarette smoke, people coming and going, the stage fright before a session, the pleasure of locking myself in the lab to develop my film, make my prints… Bliss.”
The photographer tries his hand at everything: fashion, portraiture, advertising, cinema. “From Elle to Le Monde via Paris Match, I’ve worked, if only once, for virtually every publication.” After a decade, the studio is demolished. “A blessing in disguise,” he notes. “My new quest consists of adapting to what exists, whether it’s the sun, the glow of a streetlamp or a bedside lamp.”
He refines his method. “The teams grow smaller, the relationship with my models more intimate.” He circles around, stalks the right angle. His holy grail? “When the frame and light merge to produce a square format like a record sleeve.” His credo, which gives the book its title: “Making those moments when the camera is no longer anything but an extension of oneself a perfect moment.”
Faces, not images
Moment parfait brings together 216 photographs in 30 x 30 cm format. For the cover, he chose David Lynch, piercing gaze, photographed in Cannes in 2002. Inside, we discover the spectral silhouette of Daniel Darc in Barbizon. Alain Bashung naked behind his guitar. And singer Björk in a rowboat on the pond of Vaux-de-Cernay Abbey, like a Nordic fairy lost in a French tale.
We also encounter Charlotte Gainsbourg’s fragile silhouette. Joe Strummer as a punk king in the gardens of Versailles Palace. Sinéad O’Connor, icon of grace with shaved head. Patti Smith as rock priestess. Keith Richards and Mick Jagger at Parc des Princes, Christ-like icons of electric blues. And numerous actresses, striking in their beauty and vulnerability, from Maria Schneider to Mélanie Thierry.
No excess, no artificial drama. Richard Schroeder operates differently from his predecessors: without Avedon’s surgical minimalism or Leibovitz’s baroque staging. François Hébel, former director of the Rencontres d’Arles, sums up this singularity well: “They’re no longer their image, they’re ‘faces.’ That’s when the depth and strength of being emerge.”
Richard Schroeder himself likes to say he photographs “stars like unknowns, and unknowns like stars.” The photographer chooses the territory, with no apparent connection to the person being photographed. “The subject is placed in the middle, in close-up, medium shot or full length, without system,” François Hébel continues. “Without being beautified, made-up, restyled, all are beautiful, all are powerful.”
More than photography, it’s the encounter that nourishes him. Actress Irène Jacob, who has known Richard Schroeder for 30 years, testifies: “With you, I never feel like I’m posing, or it doesn’t weigh on me. Your gaze imposes nothing, idealizes nothing, dominates nothing; there’s elegance, lightness and modesty in your concentration. You pull your camera from your leather jacket like a harmonica, you play with the reflector, you lower your lens to look your subject in the eyes.”
These icons’ portraits alternate with anonymous landscapes in the book: a deserted road in Atacama, an electrical pylon under a stormy Norman sky, a nude woman in Lisbon, a palm tree in Jaipur. The fragments of 50 years of photographic road trip. Ultimately, what Schroeder understood at 12 is that three minutes of pure rock energy can set the tone for an entire life.
moment parfait, by Richard Schroeder is published by Éditions Odyssée and available for 54€.
