Céline Dion - Une fille & 4 types, 2003

Yannick Saillet  

Céline Dion — Las Vegas, 2003 — Photographs by Yannick Saillet
These photographs were not intended to become an album cover.
They were taken in Las Vegas, in 2003, during the filming of the music video, which I was directing for Céline Dion.
The filming began the day after the recording. The album had barely been born, the song was not yet completely finished, and we were already outside, in Las Vegas, shooting the images.
Everything happened with that energy.
During those two days of filming, I felt like taking a camera. Because through my lens, I saw something in Céline that I had never seen before.
A natural, spontaneous, raw Céline.
Very far from the sophisticated image and glamour associated with one of the biggest stars in the world.
What moved me was precisely this simplicity. I had the feeling of photographing not Céline Dion as she was known, but Céline as she truly was in life.
I took these photos almost instinctively, between the scenes of the film, without imagining for a moment what they would become. They were simply another way to keep a trace of those two days and what I was seeing.
Then the photographs were developed.
We looked at them together.
And something became obvious: what these images told was exactly what this new album was telling.
It was her.
It was the spirit of the record.
This is how a photograph taken almost spontaneously during filming became the cover of , and how this series of photographs helped build the entire visual identity of the album.
More than twenty years later, I chose to return to these archives and extract a selection of about ten photographs.
Some became familiar through the album. Others remained unpublished. They all belong to the same moment, the same gaze: that of two days in Las Vegas where I had the privilege of photographing a natural, free, and deeply authentic Céline Dion.
A contact sheet can also be offered. It allows one to find the succession of these moments, almost like the stills of a film that was written in parallel to the filming.