Tribute to Serge Gainsbourg and Claude Lalanne.
L'Homme a Tête de Choux

Today I could at last finalized the shooting of a photo I'd been planning to take since a very long time. Indeed it took me a very long time because I've been impeded by many obstructions until I finally could realize my concept of this picture.

Serge Gainsbourg's albums have always meant a lot to me. It's quite obvious that I'm not the only person loving Gainsbourg's music. All the many re-mixed and re-mastered songs by contemporary artists are a clear proof of it. Even entire albums have been re-mastered in the exhaustive Gainsbourg Anniversary Edition.

Unfortunately many people only know this artist as a sleazy heavy drinker smoking Gitanes and shagging every woman around. But Gainsbourg was an artist ahead of his time and experimented with different music streams through all his career. Liaison of rock band and orchestra with histypical story telling made a few excellent concept albums. Histoire de Melody Nelson and l'Homme à la tête de chou are according to me his greatest masterpieces.

His mystical lyrics full of ambiguous verses such as :" Moitié légume, moitié mec.." plunge you right into the plot which is emphasized by telling how he first saw a sculpture in a shop window and how is was hypnotized on the spot by this unusual piece of art.

L'Homme à la tête de chou (I learned it was made in 1968 - the year I was born) is an unforgettable sculpture . I've been thinking of how to make a photo of l'Homme à la tête de chou since the first time I saw the album cover.I've been deeply under the spell of this statue's inner beauty and ambivalence until today.

Tribute to Claude Lalanne's statue and Serge Gainsbourg's album: L'Homme a tete de choux. To enlarge this photo full size CLICK on it.

This mutant with a cabbage head on a human body was permanently creeping into my head. I had so to say a picture of the statue embossed into my mind.

This statue or better said this picture of a sculpture had much more influence on me that David Lynch's movie The Elephant Man. I've always been fascinated by the metamorphosis of a human body or part of it into something else. To mention a few : Tetsuo, Hunger, Cat People, The Fly, Wolf or the complete entourage around the Residents.

I've been facing many big difficulties with the creation of tthe cabbage head I didn't want my photo to be a montage, it had to be a real human statue.

I first tried to create la tête from papier-mâché, being unsuccessful with that I asked a friend at the Prop Depatment at the Barradov Film Studios in Prague to "realize" " la Tête" using a mould. They took real cabbage leaves to form a mould and from it they made my cabbage head. I'm planning to start a complete cycle of tribute to these two artists.

Thank you Claude Lalanne, Thank you Serge Gainsbourg.