Michel Comte Michel Comte zählt zu den gefragtesten Werbe ...

Michel Comte has established an international reputation on the basis of
highly diverse photographic genres. From the very beginning, however,
one theme has remained the center of interest, namely women. His image
of woman has always been a nuanced one, as shown by these high-quality
photographs located somewhere between glamour and intimacy, strength
and vulnerability. Observable in many instances is a super cool remoteness,
but just as often, we find warm and heartfelt images characterized by
self-awareness and joie de vivre. In the end, Comte’s nudes are eroticallycharged
metaphors for an image of woman in a state of change.
Most of the exhibited works are commissions for magazines and advertising
agencies. Successful advertising is often based on maximally effective
photographic imagery, which has as a rule been elaborately planned and
retouched. A design shoot can involve dozens of types of expertise and
specialized skills, hundreds of hours of work, and budgets rising well into
six figures. For this retrospective, the Museum für Gestaltung Zürich has
accompanied Michel Comte on a number of shoots, thereby gaining insight
into his working habits and into the genesis of his omnipresent image
world. Displayed in the exhibition, then, are not “just” the final, largeformat
museum prints, but also intermediate stages of production involving
contact sheets, Polaroids, and images showing the retouching processes that
take place in the photo lab.
Over the past 10 years, Michel Comte has visited the world‘s crisis regions
with tenacious persistence, volunteering his time to such organizations
as Terre des Hommes and the Red Cross, producing reportage from
Afghanistan, Haiti, Tibet, and Bosnia. Viewed as a whole, these
documentary images narrate a true story of our planet‘s dark side. These
are images one would prefer not to see, or would like to forget, photographs
that cause us to pause and reflect, or make us feel enraged or helpless.
Images of individuals who have been deprived of an existential minimum –
or who never had it to begin with.
The present exhibition was designed by the Museum für Gestaltung Zürich
in close collaboration with I-Management (Suisse) SA and the NRW Forum
Düsseldorf.
For the Zürich venue, the exhibition project was substantially expanded,
and a great number of works are exhibited here for the first time anywhere.
This is the case in particular for the private and to some extent intimate
images from Comte’s personal visual diary, which consistently revolves
around his wife Ayako.