Isabelle Huppert par Carole Bellaïche

EDITOR’S NOTE

It was 1993 when photographer Carole Bellaïche met Isabelle Huppert for the first time. She was on a Cahiers du Cinéma assignment and she travelled to Lausanne, where Huppert was rehearsing for the play Orlando, directed by Bob Wilson. “The very first photo I took of Isabelle Huppert, actress, was the on-stage photo of a very handsome man, in Bob Wilson’s geometric light of absolute precision – she was Orlando. A man at first who magically becomes a woman, a disturbing character who straddles reality and time. Like her, in a way.”

It was the following year that Carole Bellaïche and Isabelle Huppert came to know each other. Isabelle asked Carole to photograph her as Marlène Dietrich, because Louis Malle wanted to make a film about the Hollywood star. “The project was ultimately abandoned, but we had our photos. That’s when our long romance began.”

The photographer found in Isabelle “the ideal model: complicit, playful and extremely present. A great actress, of a rare singularity, who never tires of these moments of shooting, with whom everything is possible, and who by a strange faculty changes without really changing. Her face, which is so familiar to me now, always surprises me, seduces me, fulfills me in this permanent and obsessive search for the ideal, and for beauty.” With each moment and each photo, we see her in perpetual transformation and yet wonderfully familiar. A complete actor. A fearless talent. Always reinventing herself. You can feel her arresting presence in a photograph just as if you were watching her on screen. You can not escape her intensity, be that her edgy grace, her sharp glare or her moral complexity. The more you watch her, the more of an enigma she becomes. You can not look away.

The book Isabelle Huppert par Carole Bellaïche follows Isabelle to Brazil, Cambodia, China, Cannes, accompanies her in so many experiences and special moments, and ultimately tells the story of the photographer-model relationship, but also of the rise of a star. And of a complicity in creating stories. Because each photo is a story in itself; they tell us so much, and yet they leave so much unsaid, to be discovered, to wonder about, to be fascinated by. The story of “a myth, a model woman, a muse for many, and a heroine of our times.”

DETAILS

Hard cover, 192 pages

Photographs by Carole Bellaïche, text by Alain Bergala

Language: French

Published by Éditions de la Martinière, October 2019