Born in Paris after the Second World War, Kiki of Paris was initially interested in the social sciences before he turned to drawing and painting. A meeting in Montparnasse with the writer Henry Miller, who encouraged him to take up photography, was one of the decisive moments of his career.

His first photographs were ethnographic documents, and were taken in Asia, Central Europe, Cuba, Jamaica and in particular, the United States - he lived in California and Nevada for a while. He then turned toward humanist photography, the leading exponents of which include Doisneau and Brassaï, until he redefined the scope of his work in 1995.

In 1996, on the advice of a Swiss collector from Zurich, a number of American investors bought his large format works. Kiki of Paris then had solo exhibitions in Nassau, Seattle, Paris, Tokyo, Luxembourg, plus several joint exhibitions. The series Un été vénitien [“A Venetian summer”] enjoyed great success everywhere, and was followed by a series of photographs taken in Berlin and central Europe, which, taking fairgrounds as its theme, paid homage to Fernand Léger.

His work is included in major collections (including Safra Holding, Olson Trust, and Lynch among others) and since 1999 has appeared regularly at auctions of contemporary art. Its market value is published on artprice.com

Daily life, a source of inspiration... and rigour.

A trained ethnologist, Kiki of Paris observes his fellow human beings and their interactions in urban life. This particular approach means that his work incorporates some precise (and occasionally cruel) analysis, and highlights the meticulousness of his preparatory work and research.

This exacting approach is apparent in his work, with its self-imposed restrictions: no models, never any posed subjects, nothing except what he himself can see and capture. To produce a few works a year (no more than 5 or 6), thousands of shots are destroyed forever. As an example, some compositions such as Le Messager [“The Messenger”] required more than a year’s research before being finally completed.

The theory of the Structures.

After studying the application of structuralism to cultural anthropology and linguistics, then the mathematical relationships within aesthetics (particularly perspectives), Kiki of Paris published Structures primaires et polymorphes [“Primary and polymorphic structures”] in 1999.

The works are sometimes offered with a comment, a sort of guiding thread, as if the artist wanted to guide us through the broad fields of his experience.

For the artist, primary structures encapsulate reality in a single instant: the meaning is systemic, each person finding in it what he sees there. As for polymorphic structures, these are made up of a juxtaposition of elements which gives a significant new meaning, one which cannot be grasped by taking any of those elements separately. In this, the work of Kiki of Paris is different from that of Martin Parr, the master of vernacular photography: whereas, for Parr, ordinary scenes contain sufficient irony and pathos in themselves, Kiki of Paris combines them to give them new meaning.