Depending on how gay your household is, Pierre Commoy and Gilles Blanchard may be household names; for the rest of us, this ubiquitous yet undersung duo of French artists is finally getting the big, glossy props they deserve, in the form of this honkin’ Taschen retrospective.
Imagine a metacampy, hyperstylized mashup of James Bidgood, David LaChappele, John Waters, and whoever the hell shoots Inches magazine, and you have a sense of the otherworldly allure of these photos. Sometimes their subjects seem coaxed from the periphery of seedy Genet novels — dark, dirty, beautiful, suspended in celluloid; other times, they are airbrushed to flawlessness, saturated in white light, aggressively aglitter. It’s 400 straight pages of young gods in jeans, ephebes in highly detectable states of becoming and, well, a few dozen very impressive cocks. Elsewhere, Lizzie Jagger, ensconced in roses, coyly blocks her left nip with an iridescent golf ball; Paloma Picasso is buried up to her elbows in glittering sand and flanked by fake crabs; and a woman named only as “Lola” holds some guy’s junk the way Marilyn Monroe might a Gauloises. Never before have Aryan muscle boys taking sudsy showers shimmered this perfectly — and never before has your Ansel Adams coffee-table book been quite this uncomfortable.
Related:
Flashbacks: June 23, 2006, Boston music news: August 15, 2008, Waters runs deep, More 
- Flashbacks: June 23, 2006
These selections, culled from our back files, were compiled by Doug Fleischer, Sam MacLaughlin, and Hannah Van-Susteren.
- Boston music news: August 15, 2008
Broken River Prophets, Grimis, Basement Band, and more.
- Waters runs deep
This article originally appeared in the June 23, 1981 issue of the Boston Phoenix.
- Recycled Waters
John Waters’s Hairspray , which marked his descent into an undistinguished gentility, is not even 20 years old.
- A Date With John Waters
Valentine’s Day, with its heart-shaped boxes of chocolates and colorful candy kisses, is right up filmmaker John Waters’s kitschy alley, not to mention a perfect candidate for the auteur’s obsession with incredibly strange music.
- On the racks: August 15, 2006
. . . plus mothafuckin' snakes
- John Waters runs deep
Lunch with director John Waters. The menu: delicately-spiced Vietnamese eggrolls. The conversation topic: eating shit.
- Dirty politics
The last resort of the true patriot is a fart joke.
- Review: The Lollipop Generation
There's a fine line between the trash of early John Waters and just plain garbage.
- Review: Gentlemen Broncos
Having peaked with his debut, Napoleon Dynamite , Jared Hess has settled into being a family-friendly John Waters — which is redundant, since Waters is already rated PG-13.
- Role model?
John Waters gets up close and personal
- Less
Topics:
Books
, John Waters, Marilyn Monroe, Ansel Adams, More
, John Waters, Marilyn Monroe, Ansel Adams, Pierre Commoy, Less
