Bruno de Monès

Bruno de Monès is a French photographer, born in Orléans. He is known for his black and white portraits of artists and intellectuals such as Klaus Kinski, Charles Aznavour, Salvador Dalí, Burt Lancaster and Claude Lévi-Strauss.

Life After having spent his teenage years in Morocco, Bruno de Monès moved to Paris in the mid-seventies. He became the assistant of fashion photographer Jean Clemmer; then, in 1976, he joined the audiovisual department of the Charles of the Ritz / Yves Saint Laurent perfumes company as photographer and assistant director. During this time, he decided to make portraits of personalities from the arts. These black and white pictures in sharp contrast were the subject of an exhibition at the Espace Canon (Les Yeux du miroir, Paris, 1980) and were published in a photograph album (Visages connus, faces caches. )

In the years 1980–1990, he worked for newspapers and was one of the official photographers of the Magazine Littéraire. He took famous photographs of numerous writers and intellectuals. He also worked in the ads and fashion with essentially Japanese published works. In 1994, he was one of the founders of the Mois off de la photo in Paris.

In 2010, a retrospective exhibition on his work was organised in Paris (Théâtre de l'Odéon). More than 100 portraits were exhibited under the arcades of the theatre and in the streets around. Since the 1980s until today, the works of Bruno de Monès are published in French newspapers and magazines. The photographer is also frequently published in Europe, America and Asia. Since 2010, he has been working on scriptwriting projects.