“I will never say I won’t do a job because I don’t like it. There are somethings I can’t do because I don’t know how to, but otherwise I will do anything and this is a good lesson in humility. Even though I am doing exactly what my client wants, I put my personality into the pictures”
~ Jean-Philippe Charbonnier
(1921-2004)
“Don’t play what’s there, play what’s not there."
~ Miles Davis
(1926-1991)
There are very few images I have ever seen in the history of photography that possess the romantic and erotic tension that this one does. Juliette Gréco was 22 years old—the muse of Saint-Germain-des-Prés—when she set eyes on the trumpeter, the up-and-coming “Picasso of Jazz,” Miles Davis.
In May 1949, the International Jazz Festival was reborn in Paris, and the biggest American names in bebop had made a special effort to attend. This was the first time Miles Davis had left the USA. He performed at the Salle Pleyel concert hall with pianist Tadd Dameron’s quintet. “I saw him from the side. He was an Egyptian god,” said Gréco, who was watching him from backstage. “I had never seen such a beautiful man—and I haven’t seen one since.”
The lovers lived together at the Hôtel La Louisiane in the 6th arrondissement. Accompanied by Gréco, Davis met Jean-Paul Sartre, Boris Vian, and Picasso. The pair would stroll along the Seine, hand in hand, stopping for a kiss—an unthinkable idyll in the USA, where interracial relationships were forbidden. In France, Davis enjoyed a new freedom. “I had never felt that way in my life,” he wrote in his autobiography. “It was the freedom of being in France and being treated like a human being.” A number of African-American musicians settled in Paris, but Davis eventually decided to return home. When Sartre asked him why he refused to ask Gréco to marry him, he replied “Because I love her.” He knew that Black and white didn’t go together in America. She said years later: “He knew I would be unhappy and that I would be treated like a common whore in America.” How a single image can speak to such intense human and political issues—well, that’s the power of the medium.
