| About denis piel denis is a photographer, filmmaker, writer and artist who also acts as a consultant to creative projects around the world.
Denis Piel earned an international reputation for his beauty, fashion and celebrity spreads for glossy magazines as well as for directing stylish commercials, winning many international awards including the coveted Leica Award of Excellence for his contribution to commercial photography.
In 1985, he founded and ran Jupiter Films, an internationally successful film production company. In the following decade, his conceptual imagery and “Based in Life” signature style had him working internationally with agency and often direct with clients to create unique non-advertising commercials, many regarded as milestones to this day.
From 1997 to 2000 he was instrumental in the development of “umbershoot” an ideasbank with the concept of cross-pollinating skills to develop ideas.
He is a founding member of Front2End <http://www.f2e.net/>,a branding collective.
Denis is represented in New York, by Cornelia Adams for photography and by Window Productions in Sydney, Australia for TVC’s.
Denis has been a guest lecturer at the New School for Social Research, Parson's School of Design, the Maine Photographic Workshops, Masters Class Workshop and the Washington Smithsonian Institute "Masters of Photography" series.
He has shot more than 1000 editorial spreads for us, German, Italian, French, English Vogue, Vanity Fair, Self and Gentlemen's Quarterly. this includes many celebrity portraits ranging from the films stars Geena Davis, Nastasia Kinski, andi McDowell, Darryl Hannah, Isabella Rosellini, Goldie Hawn, Jamie Lee Curtis, Lillian Gish, Donald Sutherland, Jeanne Moreau, and Uma Thurman, to the directors and film producers Brain de Palma and Sherry Lansing to politicians such as Mario Cuomo, the writers Joan Didion, Erica Jong, to artists as diverse as Man Ray, Willem and Elaine de Kooning and Jasper Johns and the dancers Mark Morris and Merce Cunningham to name a few.
In addition he has created and executed countless commercial beauty and fashion projects for Anne Klein, Revlon, L'oréal, Calvin Klein, Donna Karan, Fortune, Sheraton, Guerlain, Helena Rubenstein, Bergdorf Goodman, Ultima, Estée Lauder, Max Factor, Elizabeth Arden, Chanel, and more.
Apart from his commercial work denis last year concurrently worked on three projects, PREMIER OEIL, FACESCAPES and PLATESCAPES. PLATESCAPES was exhibited 2006 at the Way of Arts gallery in Lisbon, Portugal. It was the first showing of this work. PLATESCAPES follows a recurrent theme which appears in Denis's work, that of capturing the off moments, those moments that so much stimulate us to imagine the unseen story... what was the food, the people, the occasion. ".......Platescapes is an accented interpretation of the still life photograph. The metaphoric bones, the menacing-eyed shrimp, the lonely fork, the sauce asking to stay – there is still life – Piel is suggesting. In the universal activity of man lies a universe of gestures and emotions, a thumbprint of our particular identities, left on tables around the world, everyday. Perhaps it is not so much we are what we eat as much as we are what we leave over. It is the empty plate as modern day fossil record.--------conversations are still dripping on the plates and emotions are still carved into the knives. Time is a frozen gesture here and Piel warms our visual instincts to what, in all likelihood, we have frozen out of our frames. Allowing us to see with such piercing clarity what we have consumed, he allows us to consume what is never very clear: who we are." Howard Altmann (Poet and Philosopher- New York) The conversations of these dinners play along side the images. The integration of sound and image is an increasingly strong element within denis's work. PREMIER OEIL are images of his first waking vision of the morning, the anticipation of the day to come. The first of these images can be seen at: http://www.denispiel.com/index_series.php?main_category_id=4
FACESCAPES is Denis’s most ambitious project to date.
"FACESCAPES- latitude 43.533333 longitude 2.066662" was shown in Sydney, Australia in February last year
FACESCAPES China and Australia will be included in the exhibition in Lisbon, Portugal in April of this year.
“FACESCAPES” EXHIBITION Following a humanist tradition of getting in close on the subject to reveal the traces of life, FACESCAPES are very large close up photographic images presenting landscapes of peoples faces, faces as a field, abstracts -- a topography of flesh. They illustrate how life has left it’s mark - how time and experience changes a face just as time, weather and human intervention change the topography of the landscapes we inhabit. They are abstracted, static, confronting, sometimes brutal studies. The film, “FACESCAPES latitude 43.533333 longitude 2.06666” shown as part of the multi-media event, brings together filmed interviews showing the same subjects talking very simply about their life experience and the static images to form an intimate portrait of a fairly typical small village in rural France. One thing that you are left with is that the human face, no matter how abstracted, is inherently sympathetic and worthy of our interest both visually and conceptually. We read it like a book, are familiar with its various signals, like the deep crevices or strands of hair jutting from an aged cheek. The face is a place of infinite projection and empathy. FACESCAPES provides a space for that projection and empathy. FACESCAPES, latitude 43.533333 longitude 2.06666 (Lempaut, France) is the first of a series of explorations into the commonality of the human condition in different parts of the world. This first in the series is now available for distribution. It is the first of a series encapsulating peoples lives in different parts of the world.
The next FACESCAPES at Evans Head in Auatralia and Jiu Xian in China have been shot and are now in the editing stages. These are planned to be finished in time for the exhibition in Lisbon, Portugal in April 2008.
Denis exhibits his work at the Staley Wise Gallery in New York city, The Way Of Arts in Lisbon, Portugal with his work also appearing in exhibitions at the, The Museum of Fine Arts, Boston <http://www.mfa.org/exhibitions/sub.asp?key=15&subkey=3348> "Fashion Photography", Furman Gallery, Walter Reade Theater, Lincoln Center International Center of Photography, International Festival of Photography Houston, "Evolution/ Revolution Nine Decades of Fashion Photography"(exhibition also traveled to Japan), Platinum Plus, Sante Fe, New Mexico, Musei Capitolini in Rome" Valentino" Thirty Years of Magic Images 1960-1990", Fashion Institute of Technology, Goldie Paley Gallery, Moore College of Art "Images of Desire: Portrayals of Recent Advertising Photography", International Museum of Photography at George Eastman House, Rochester, New York, International Center of Photography, "The Art of Persuasion - A History of Advertising Photography", The Cartier Foundation, "The Stars of Photography", Victoria and Albert Museum, London, "Shots of Style in Photography", BMW Galleries " 7 Decades of Style in Photography", The Mint Museum, Charlotte, NC "The Fashionable Image", Cannon, France" Photographs et Models de Notre Temps", Foto galleriet, Oslo, Norway, The Nikon House, Paris. with his work also held by many private collectors
Born France, 1944
Australian & French National
Married with one child
Living in South-West France
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