Francis Giacobetti

Born in Marseilles in 1939, Francis Giacobetti is a world-renown photographer and filmmaker. He began his career as a staff photographer for Paris Match in 1957. Since the 1960s he has worked for various fashion publications including Vogue. In 1963 he became the art director of Lui Magazine, France’s answer to Playboy. In 1970 and 1971 he photographed two editions of the infamous Pirelli Calendar. In 1984, Giacobetti began a series of celebrity portraits comprising over 200 subjects, including Federico Fellini, Stephen Hawking, Francoise Sagan, Philippe Starck, and Yehudi Menuhin. In the fall of 1991, Giacobetti was introduced to Francis Bacon and subsequently created a 200-image portrait series of Bacon. The Bacon work became the subject of a solo show at Marlborough Gallery, London which traveled to the Art Institute of Chicago and the Moderna Museet, Stockholm. Giacobetti’s photographs for Issey Miyake were shown in solo exhibitions at the Tokyo Museum of Art and the Museum of Contemporary Art, Tokyo. Giacobetti’s work has been shown in solo exhibitions worldwide including at the Stedelijk Museum, Amsterdam; the Louvre, Paris; Fondation Beyeler, Switzerland; Isetan Museum of Art, Tokyo and the Los Angeles County Museum of Art. A monograph, Francis Bacon by Francis Giacobetti was published by Christie’s in 2005.