Erogenous Parts

The French Are Different from the rest of us. First of all, they dress better. They also talk faster and move their hands a lot. Their jobs allow them to spend most of the afternoon in smoky cafés, where it takes them an hour to drink a tiny cup of coffee. The worst thing a Frenchman can do is lose an argument. The best thing a Frenchman can do is think about women. This he does all the time. Thinking about women takes on a sacred dimension for him. Much of the French language is used to describe the intricacies of women: how they walk, how they look when draped in clothes, how they might look without them. Frenchmen know from a very early age that women are going to occupy most of their waking hours and some of their sleeping hours as well. It goes with the territory. Francis Giacobetti's name doesn't sound French, but the person who owns it is relentlessly Gallic in his tastes. And he has adopted his adopted country's obsession with women. (Note his remarks on the pictures below. He does not treat his subject lightly.) Unlike most Frenchmen and most Americans, Giacobetti can indulge his interest and get paid for it. That's because he's a photographer—one who continually redefines what film can say about women and who discovers which of their secrets can be coaxed to show up on emulsion. His experiments established the pictorial style of France's Lui magazine. And then he turned to the movie camera and directed Emmanu-elle, the Joys of a Woman. We asked him to describe what it is he docs and he replied, "I take pictures of thousands of women with not many clothes on them and I steal from them tenths of seconds and sometimes a little part of their lives. They become my most beautiful trips and my softest landscapes." He takes his work seriously. Turn the page and see.