Published by Steidl. Edited by Patrick Remy. Interview by Babeth Djian.
Guido Mocafico: Mocafico Numéro compiles all of Guido Mocafico’s provocative still-life photography shot for Numéro to date in a lavish three-volume slipcased edition. In 1999, pioneering fashion editor and stylist Babeth Djian founded Numéro, the now famous Paris-based fashion magazine with an unmistakable aesthetic boldly combining fashion and contemporary art. Every month since the very beginning of the magazine’s run, Dijan has given Mocafico (born 1962) complete freedom to shoot what he wishes for the closing pages of the magazine. An established fashion photographer and regular contributor to such publications as Vogue, Harper’s Bazaar and V Magazine, Mocafico composes radical still lifes out of objects like perfume bottles, shoes, watches and jewelry for Numéro, shooting in ways that incorporate the conventions of architecture, landscape and nude photography (and make comparable work in other magazines look like uninspired product shots). These still lifes have become a calling card for the magazine, and the work produced for this experimental forum has sparked some of Mocafico’s most influential series, including Medusa, Movement, Serpens and Stilleven. Luxurious yet slyly critical of contemporary vanity, Mocafico’s work for Numéro continues to upend expectations for fashion magazine photography and provide a model for creative experimentation in the genre.
Stilleven is Guido Mocafico's interpretation of the great Dutch and German still-life paintings of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. By painstakingly reconstructing banquet and floral scenes as well as vanitas still-lifes by artists such as Floris van Dijck and Pieter Claesz, Mocafico not only duplicates these paintings but brings them back to life. Using a large-format analogue camera with color transparencies, Mocafico creates brilliant images with the highest degree of verisimilitude. Mocafico's triumph, however, is not only recreating the appearance of things, but his restaging of the devout atmosphere of these paintings. Limited edition of 300 copies signed and numbered by the artist.
Guido Mocafico: Stilleven