HERE is a very partial catalogue of what you might find in a Michel Comte photograph: flowers and fur (still on the living animals more often than not) and cigarette smoke and skin (lots of skin) and light and sex and ropes and glamour and fame and a sense that you are sinking deep into a decadent dream.
Comte is a photographer who has shot Daryl Hannah reclining on top of an elephant, a cigarette in her mouth, a bare-chested Jeremy Irons embracing a horse, Mike Tyson kissing a dove, Carla Bruni famously naked (a 1993 photograph that caused a ruckus when it emerged in 2008 just before then French president Nicolas Sarkozy visited London with France's first lady Bruni in tow).
These are high-gloss images for high-gloss magazines. They offer sheeny perfection. Photography as a desire machine. They turn up in Vanity Fair or Interview magazine or Italian Vogue. Comte has been fashioning dream images for the fashion industry for years.
But then there is the other Michel Comte. The one who works with the International Red Cross and who sometimes travels to war zones to take pictures. The one who has been to Iraq and Bosnia and Afghanistan. The one who has experienced threats rather more than heated rollers. "Many times people were shooting at us. There were cars blowing up a few feet in front of us," he says.
It's 10 in the morning in Los Angeles. Early yet. Unless you're Michel Comte. He's been up since five, gone for a run before sunrise and is now getting ready to write. There's a screenplay to be finished. He's been working on it for weeks. The only time he has left his Bel Air home of late has been to run down to the Bel Air Hotel for a cup of tea and then run back.
I am interrupting that process to talk about his photographic past rather than his cinematic future. There is a new book of his images out. The first of a few, actually. The rest are scheduled for the fall, he says, suggesting that his American present has impacted on his European past whatever the accent might say.
Michel Comte and Milk: A Collaboration 1996-2006 is a reflection of the glossy side of his oeuvre. Celebrity images, fashion shots, refined artiness. At times flicking through its pages you feel like you're viewing Comte's own private films. "I think private films is the right way to put it, no? If you look very close there are some very explicit images in there."
Well, yes, though what's really interesting, I think, is more the excessive visual imagination. Where does the image start, you have to wonder. To explain, he talks me through his thinking for his next job. A portrait of "the biggest blogger in the world. I'm not allowed to say his name".
Comte envisions it as a rags-to-riches story. "It's a Gatsby story, this young kid. I thought: 'My God, this is f****** Great Gatsby.
"But it will be very modern. He might wear a skirt. He might get naked on a motorbike with suspenders. Or he's in a house that's far too big and the taste is not perfect. That's how it all starts. We have another one I'm preparing based on a very famous painting by Jacques Louis David. So it comes from art, from music, from everything."
Comte was born in Switzerland in 1954, the grandson of Swiss aviation pioneer Alfred Comte. He studied in England, where he wanted to work as an assistant for David Bailey until his father intervened. Instead, he began a career in art restoration before being discovered by Karl Lagerfeld.
In one of those unlikely stories on which the fashion industry seems to thrive, he was given a chance to do a shoot for the Chloe fashion label out of the blue because he met Karl Lagerfeld at a dinner. "I had two photographs when I saw him because I was working in a museum at the time."
By all accounts Helmut Newton was meant to do the shoot but his camera jammed and he had another job to do. So Lagerfeld asked the young man with no experience. "He said: 'Well, Newton was supposed to shoot. Why don't you? I'll give you Newton's assistant.' And that was it. Believe it or not those were my first published pictures, that Chloe campaign."
What, you have to wonder, did Lagerfeld see in him? "I think in the end we have a very similar taste. I see him every once in a while. Karl is always the same. He's bigger than life."
Lagerfeld never got on a plane and went to a war zone, though. Michel, do you have war junkie tendencies? Have you ever put yourself into dangerous situations to know you are alive? "I used to, yeah. I think right now maybe a little bit less. I don't feel like going to war now. Maybe I will again."
In fact he was all set to go to Syria late last year. But he flew into Paris hours before the attacks that killed more than 100 people in November and that made him change his mind. We are talking the day after the suicide bombings in Belgium. Things are raw.
That is the last thing you could say about his images for Italian Vogue. Comte the fashion photographer is all about dark fantasy rather than reality.
"I never intended to be a fashion photographer," he says. "I'm not a fashion photographer at all. I got lucky. I'm still really hot in it but again it has a lot to do with my collaboration with Italian Vogue and Franco Sozzani [the magazine's editor-in-chief] who is one of my friends. We've been loyal to each other over the years."
Maybe that's the other thing you can see in Michel Comte's photographs if you look closely enough. Friendship. Even fantasies need that.
Michel Comte and Milk: A Collaboration 1996–2016 is published by Damiani, priced £50.
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