The Irish-born photographer Edward Quinn landed on the Côte d'Azur in 1949, armed with his Rolleiflex and some impeccable timing. After all, when it came to camera-ready, pulchritudinous fantasies of sun, skin and celebrity, there was never a time and place quite like the French Riviera of the "Golden Fifties," where postwar exuberance assumed bikini-clad form and glitterati made one sparkling appearance after another. Before the era of private photographers, press agents, and contractual agreements, Quinn gained access to the darlings of the day with those quaintest and most effective of weapons: his own subtlety and charm.
Throughout Riveria Cocktail (teNeues, $95), Quinn offers glimpses into the world of actors, actresses, artists, and politicos that would be impossible to capture now without being trampled by fellow paparazzi or knocked aside by sharp-elbowed members of a teenage celeb's mouthy entourage. A barefoot Brigitte Bardot safely nestles in the arm of husband Jacques Charrier (left); a smiling Marlon Brando enjoys a leisurely seaside stroll. For some stars, Quinn even helped broker future success—his pictures of a then-unknown Audrey Hepburn won Hollywood's attention, and it was Quinn who orchestrated the first meeting between Grace Kelly and Prince Rainier III. He introduced himself to Picasso in 1951, spawning a life-long friendship that allowed him to capture a seldom-seen private side of that very public genius. Soon enough, Quinn's subjects learned to trust the elusive man behind the camera, perhaps in part because his sympathetic vision of their lives was exactly how they wished to be seen.
Thus, with an audience eager to leave the previous decade's horrors and deprivations behind and embrace the dream of leisure, fame, and abundance, the cult of celebrity was born.
Quinn carved out a niche for himself by depicting a rarefied, gilded world of desires perpetually fulfilled—a smooth-edged, black-and-white precursor to today's train-wreck sensibility of resort-rehabbed, panty-less celebrities at their worst. His work represents the first act in an oft-repeated melodrama: a world of innocents reveling before a catastrophic fall. In his work we find a comforting lack of shock value, sensationalism, and schadenfreude—the unholy trinity of contemporary paparazzi culture. Though the line between the public and quotidian life of his subjects remains fuzzy in Quinn's pictures, he is evidently more interested in preservation than defamation. Luckily for us, the Riviera Edward Quinn chronicled remains a timeless place where no one swings a fist or aims his car at the camera, no one looks bored, and all the pin-up girls carry parasols in the sun.
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