New Portrait of An Old Friend

New Portrait of An Old Friend

by William Lulow

This is a portrait I made of my friend, French photographer Jean Rault back in 1988:

I understood all about studio lighting back then because I had opened my own studio in New York City in 1980. For years prior to that, I had studied lighting and how to apply it for doing photographic portraits. Since then, Not only have I studied even more, but I have been practicing it for a long time and hopefully gotten better at it. I tell all my students that if you want to get really good at something, you need to practice it until you feel that you know all its details backwards and forwards!

I met Jean in the small French town of Honfleur, Normandy, very near the English Channel, and totally by chance. His wife, at the time, was an artist as well and was having a show at a local gallery. My wife, Judie and I were interested in one of her works for our soon-to-be daughter’s room, as Judie was pregnant with her at the time. We told her that we wanted to grab some dinner and that we would be back later to buy the print. She said she would not be there, but her husband would be. That is how Jean and I met. He told me at the time, that he was also a photographer, so we bonded immediately and have been friends ever since.

I have seen Jean during the intervening years, but the last time was in 2005. I visited him these past few days to reconnect and also see a new retrospective exhibition of many of his photographs:

What makes this a portrait and not a “headshot” is that it is totally my conception of an older friend who I know very well. He is separated from his photographs in the background and, as many photographers, he doesn’t like to sit for his own portrait. But, as I have learned over a long career, it is important for photographers to know what it is like to sit where their subjects have sat and experience what it is like to have a professional portrait made of them. So, he allowed me to make several images of him at his large, retrospective exhibition in Montreul, France, just next to the outskirts of Paris. Here is another:

And one with the owners of the gallery, Evelyne Artaud & Bruno Bernard:

One thing I noticed about Jean this year is that he still maintains his seriousness of purpose in photography, his intense philosophy of life and art and his amazing feeling for friendships and the human condition itself.