The Daily Telegraph - Saturday - Review
Revving around the Riviera
Irish photographer Edward Quinn made his name shooting stars and their cars, from Bardot to Delon
Cannes, Juan-les-Pins, Cap Ferrat. In the 1950s, the craggy coastline of the French Riviera was the most fashionable playground on earth, drawing the jet set to its sensuous pleasures like moths to a flame.
Among the dusty poplars and palm trees, Hollywood actors and directors, artists, faded aristocrats and playboys passed their days idling at one beach or another, driving the twisting, heat-soaked roads in a convoy of sleek, open-topped cars. (Once evening fell, a whirl of dancing and drinking saw them through til dawn.)
Cars were a big thing on the Côte d’Azur at the time: a potent symbol of freedom and mobility following the privations of the still recent war. Just as the acres of silk in Dior’s Bar skirt had signalled an end to “make-do and mend” fashion, so the shiny extravagance of a Cadillac or a Roller, even the cute Panhard Dyna, conveyed to the world that its owner was carefree and going places.
A new book, Stars and Cars, pays homage to this moment of sundrenched automophilia. Irish photographer Edward Quinn was 29 when he moved to the French Riviera in 1949. The son of a Guinness brewery worker, he had previously only flirted with photography, during the war, and since then had
Picasso, a petrolhead, also sat for Quinn in a Lincoln, a Chrysler and a Cadillac
been making his living as a pilot – although he also moonlighted as an electric guitarist on the side, with the stage name Eddie Quinero.
On the Côte, Quinn, who was extremely tall and favoured a pinstripe double-breasted suit, quickly became the go-to photographer
for the magazine Paris Match and international news agencies such as Black Star in London, who fell over themselves for as many snaps of Brigitte Bardot, Grace Kelly, Sophia Loren – even Winston Churchill – as Quinn could provide.
And he provided many. Not least because, unlike most paparazzi on the same strip, Quinn was known and loved for being well-mannered and self-effacing. Many of the celebrities you see in these pictures became his friends.
Picasso, for one, adored him. He even invited the photographer to his home in nearby Vallauris, where Quinn was allowed to take pictures of the artist with his children, and at work in his ceramic studio.
One picture shows him standing by the Hispano-Suiza limousine to which he had treated himself in the 1930s, a surprisingly bourgeois purchase to mark his first flush of success. Picasso, who seems to have been a bit of a petrolhead, also sat for Quinn in a Talbot Lago-Record, a Chrysler sedan, a Lincoln Premiere convertible and a Cadillac.
“Toi, tu sais faire un portrait” (You, you know how to make a portrait) – Picasso told Quinn, an accolade the photographer treasured until his death.