André Carrara

Born in Paris in 1939, André Carrara was a teenager when he first encountered photography. Accompanying his sister in the photographic laboratory where she was employed, he was given a camera and left to take his first pictures in Paris. These first experiences fascinate him and decide his future: he will be a photographer. First an apprentice in different laboratories where he learned about development and printing while following evening classes at the Rue de Vaugirard school, he joined at 20 as an assistant in the SNIP advertising agency, a real hive where come together, photographers, designers or graphic designers. It was there that he truly discovered photography alongside Willy Rizzo, Fouli Elia, Guy Bourdin or Jean-Bernard Naudin. It is with the latter that he will learn the trade and perfect his apprenticeship. In 1963, he made his first series of shots there, a highly noticed advertising campaign for Lacoste. André Carrara's career as a photographer is launched. Antoine Kieffer, then artistic director of Vogue France, struck by the quality of his black and white shots, gave him a chance and ordered his first reports. Everything accelerated when Hélène Lazareff, at the helm of Elle, the magazine she created in 1945, requested it. He then joined other prestigious photographers, regular collaborators such as Helmut Newton or Hans Feurer. Roman Cieslewitz has just joined as artistic director. This arrival marks the revival of the magazine layout that he transforms according to his own graphic vision, characterized by the clarity and simplicity of plastic expression. This collaboration with the man who is considered to be one of the greatest graphic designers of the second half of the 20th century is for André Carrara a determining factor: he perfects his style and then signs many very graphic reports with Cieslewitz. The collaboration is interspersed with a three-year trip to the United States, where he reports for Mademoiselle, Glamor ... Back in France in the early 70s, he resumed his collaboration at Elle and published in many magazines as in the British, German or Italian editions of Vogue, while becoming one of the main collaborators of the MAFIA advertising agency. If in the 1990s, at the request of Anna Wintour, André Carrara contributed regularly to the American magazine Allure as well as to other major titles, the years 1980-2000 were especially the years Marie-Claire and Marie-Claire bis where he realizes, with Walter Rospert then Fred Rawiler as artistic directors, his most beautiful subjects, his most beautiful photos.