Charlene, Princess of Monaco
julian lennon
On July 1, 2011, Princess Charlene married Albert II, Prince of Monaco. Before she walked down the aisle, she sat backstage with her friend, Julian Lennon, who photographed her getting ready.
Ten minutes before she got married, she was sitting in a hotel surrounded by assistants, hairdressers and makeup artists. She turned to Lennon, who is the first son of John Lennon, and expressed her anxiety.
“She just sat, staring, kind of numb in the mirror,” recalls Lennon. “She turned to me and said, Jules, I don’t know if I can do this.’ I’m going, ‘What are you talking about?’ She said, ‘I can’t do it, I’m not sure I can do the photographs, there’s too many distractions.’
Lennon told her: “This is a historic moment; just let me just be a fly on the wall.”
He proceeded to take hundreds of photographs, some of which wound up on Vogue’s website. Lennon loved the photo of Princess Charlene looking in the mirror before her wedding, so he put it on the cover of his new photo book, Life’s Fragile Moments, which was recently released by teNeues.
Venice
Julian Lennon
“I cropped it in a certain way, and I thought, oh my God, there it is; It’s Princess Grace, it’s the 1950s,” he said. “So, I turned all the pictures black and white.”
Lennon continued to “crop the photos in a certain way that was more like Time or Life magazine back in the day,” he said. “And that’s what they look like; they look like they were photos taken way back when, and that was literally probably eight minutes before she became princess.”
Lennon has lived in Monaco for 30 years. “It’s a great base because I love Italy, it’s 20 minutes away in the car and I love France, I’m a foodie, and Spain’s just down the road, a bit of a drive, too,” said Lennon. Convenience wise, in Europe, it’s fabulous. Monaco, and the surrounding areas, is a breathing space for me.”
Lennon is a motorcyclist and loves to roll through the mountains, “I’ll just go, even if I don’t know where I’m going,” he said. “I enjoy the thrill of just getting lost.”
Photo by Julian Lennon
Julian Lennon
His new photo book takes a similar approach—it’s an amalgamation of his best photos taken over the past two decades, from trips to Africa, to shots of clouds taken on airplanes, to portraits of stars we might know in the public eye, like Lana Del Rey or Sting.
The photographer was recently in New York City to give a talk at NeueHouse, which was presented by Fotografiska. “It is a retrospective,” said Lennon. “I’ve wanted to do a photography book for years. Everybody turned me down, really. The publishers of this book house in Germany, teNEues came to me and said, ‘Listen, do you want to do a book?’ I said, ‘Hell yeah.’ And they said, ‘Why haven’t you done one?’ I said, ‘You tell me.’”
“And so, so it began,” adds Lennon, who recently wrapped up his photo retrospective exhibition, Whispers, at the Stanze Della Fotografie in Venice.
Lennon’s favorite photographers include Ansel Adams and Elliot Erwitt, both of whose influence is evident in his books. There are quiet portraits, fleeting moments and cityscapes.
Photo by Julian Lennon
Julian Lennon
“A lot of the portrait pictures in the book aren’t setups, I never use artificial lighting,” said Lennon. “I use whatever’s available. I’ve never done a photo session in my life where I’ve told people where to go, what’s it, what to do. I’ve just been fortunate enough to be around certain environments and certain things that have enabled me to be in the background, just taking a few shots here and there.”
The book’s title, Life’s Fragile Moments, comes from his own experience in life. “It’s about those split seconds in life,” he said, “of people’s lives and things and landscapes around us that change in a heartbeat.”
Sting
Julian Lennon
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Publish date : 2025-01-07 06:12:00
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