In Person – Michel Comte

When I met the Clintons in the White House, I moved the furniture. They told me: ‘No one has moved that sofa in 200 years.’ I said it needed to be placed upstairs. And as far as I know, until Obama it was still where I put it.

Swiss artist and photographer Michel Comte’s career spans the golden decades of fashion, film, and contemporary culture. After a radical break to reclaim his name, he turned to art and themes of fragility, memory, and the natural world, shaped by personal loss, global conflict, and a humanistic worldview. His path — from the world of celebrity to an uncompromising independent art practice — reflects a commitment to reinvention, curiosity, and ongoing creative explorations.

I came prepared for this conversation — a set of questions, neat transitions, an imagined chronological path. But speaking with Michel Comte requires surrendering any predetermined direction. His thoughts move in elliptical constellations — memory, resistance, conviction — and if you follow them closely, everything eventually aligns. His name automatically connects to the long and remarkable career portraying celebrities, musicians, artists — figures whose public personas seemed, to most, like an unreachable state of life. Yet Comte never approached them as icons. He approached them as people. Perhaps that’s why so many of his subjects appear vulnerable — not fragile, but raw, unmasked, allowing something deeply human to rise to the surface. “I didn’t become a photographer to feature celebrities. That was never my intention. Fame was never interesting to me; people were.” Before his career took off, Comte worked at the Centre Pompidou on the Yves Klein retrospective — a moment that led to Karl Lagerfeld discovering him and hiring him for Chloé. From there, his career expanded and became woven into the golden years of fashion, film, and advertising, with opportunities today’s industry can only imagine. His photographs have themselves become iconic, and I find myself asking: what does it mean to let go of an archive so completely — inseparable from his name, defining decades of his life? But perhaps letting go was exactly what he needed in order to redefine his name, his practice, and his artistic direction. Today, Comte’s relationship to the archive is ambivalent.

He acknowledges its historical weight but also the necessity of distance. Maybe an archive of this calibre must live beyond the person who created it. None of this is simple. But then again — what is? “I said to myself that I wanted to reverse the cycle and return to where I started. I wanted to create works where, instead of people asking me, I would simply produce. I had a very strong resentment toward the label ‘Michel Comte, star photographer.’” He sold his vast archive of negatives and vintage prints — more than 550,000 pieces spanning 1979 to 2007 — into the custodianship of Andreas Putsch, who, with his team, is establishing a carefully tended estate: a monumental window into Comte’s photographic legacy and the rise of the cult celebrity from the 80s to the present. “I was at the Ritz doing a portrait of Wallis Franken Montana. She walked in and said: ‘Can I take all my clothes off? I want to be naked in front of you.’ She sat completely naked, legs wide open, smoking, wearing huge silver bracelets. The light was low, so I put her hand on her leg to cover part of her pubic area. She said: ‘You made a very big mistake. You made me aware of my nudity. When I’m with you, I never feel naked.’”

And that is what remains so striking: his unique eye, the tenderness between photographer and subject, the ability to notice the details that matter — the small, often invisible moments submerged beneath the noise of the larger narrative. A photograph may freeze time, but it does not erase the time around it. The frame is residue of a human moment. Comte understood how to create that moment — the conversation, the dance, the granular reactions — and then distill the noise into a single click. Then came a “radical break,” as he calls it, and his sole focus since 2008 has been dedicated to his art making. And although his current artistic practice largely does not speak of the human body, which was so crucial to his photography, it is the same tenderness, the care for detail, the actually important things I seem to see in his installations, photo documentary, and paintings too. Molecular structures, ecological fragility, the entanglement of life — these themes run through his contemporary artistic engagements.

“For ten years I didn’t have a job — nothing. I lived from my savings and produced artworks that I slowly started sharing. Everyone said: ‘You’re crazy. You’re so famous. Look what the other photographers are doing — retrospectives, going into their archives.’ But I live in the present and plan for the future.” During that time he sketched installations, painted, sculpted, and quietly built a body of work. Those years were, as he puts it, “blood, sweat and tears to get away from my name.” The work and patience have paid off, as Comte is looking at a full calendar of exhibitions, commissions, and installations for the coming year. His lens and his worldview remain consistently humanistic, attuned to what we have and what we risk losing. Hovering between introspection and continuous conversations, it seems art is how he makes sense of the world — inner and outer. It is with no small sense of awe to listen to Comte’s trajectory between the loud, fantastical worlds of stars and the very personal impetus of creating and defining his own future, from which one memory he shared in our conversation has stuck and has the same distilling effect of a camera click: “One of the most memorable moments of my career: I did a conference in Berlin where Mikhail Gorbachev and I sat side by side answering questions about peace. That was extraordinary. My father later said he was proud. Perhaps that was the moment I felt I had done the right thing.”