One rainy night on a boat in rough seas, I’m heading to Mallorca to visit Jean Marie del Moral, a Spanish photographer born in France. While rocking on the waves, I go over Jean Marie’s bio and his work, a sea of experiences, travels, projects and encounters that have delved deep into one of the subjects that I’m most passionate about: portraits of artists and their studios, those great temples of creation, places moulded by the artists themselves, where they keep their secrets and sources of inspiration.
Joan Miró. Mallorca. Spain. 1978.
Jean Marie has forged his way as a photographer from a young age. He left school at 14 to work full time at photography. At the end of the 60s, he began to doing his first sports and social articles for local media. At just 20 years of age, he joined the staff of the L’Humanité newspaper as a press photographer, and two years later he moved to Canada, where he was the photographer of the official film of the Montreal Olympic games in 1976.
He also travelled to the United States. There he discovered the work of Irving Penn, Walker Evans and Paul Strand, one of his favourite photographers, who also showed him a way to his photographic style. He returned to Paris in 1977. He worked freelance for L’Humanité Dimanche, a prestigious magazine with an extraordinary...
