'The Earth from the Air' photographer Yann Arthus-Bertrand shares the secrets of his work with Lara Marlowe
In the introduction to Yann Arthus- Bertrand's latest photography book, Horses, the writer Jean-Louis Gouraud calls him "a gust of wind". It's a good description of France's most famous contemporary photographer. At 59, Arthus-Bertrand still has outdoorsy, American-style good looks that remind one vaguely of Paul Newman or Ted Turner. In the late 1960s, according to Being a Photographer, his biography, he wandered "into the arms of the French actress Michèle Morgan". Arthus-Bertrand's unruly hair and moustache are greying, but he is still suntanned and energetic, and he talks with the rapidity of a camera on autodrive. This son of an affluent family of Parisian jewellers immediately addresses all visitors in the familiar tu. He rarely finishes sentences and shoots 5,000 rolls of film a year - many of them while hanging out of a helicopter or other aircraft.
As we talk, Arthus-Bertrand paces and answers the telephone, looks for documents on a shelf, shouts to one of his 15 assistants, serves himself from a pot of green tea. The conversation dashes off in multiple directions, with frequent interruptions: what it means to be a photographer; the definition of beauty; techniques for photographing horses; his outdoor exhibitions, which have drawn 60 million visitors.
"I would love to do an outdoor exhibition in Ireland!" Arthus-Bertrand exclaims. "Why not Horses?" An assistant scurries off to gather documentation on budgets (more than €80,000) and other details of sponsoring a two-month outdoor photography exhibition.
It is more difficult to schedule an appointment with Arthus-Bertrand than it is with a French cabinet minister. A glance at the planning board in the low, modern villa in the Bois de Boulogne that he uses as a headquarters shows why: Phuket, Sumatra, Algeria, Haiti, Kenya, Korea, Kabul, Corsica, London, Santo Domingo . . . And that's just so far this year.
Arthus-Bertrand was the first to photograph pets with all the attention devoted to top models. At the annual Salon d'Agriculture farm fair, he shoots pigs, cows, goats and bulls against his signature brown backdrop, often accompanied by their owners, groomed and lit up like stars.
Arthus-Bertrand breaks off in mid interview for an urgent chat with a man from the World Wildlife Fund. He apologetically shifts me to the conference room, with a pile of books to pass the time. I open Being a Photographer. "Yann Arthus-Bertrand is, quite simply, a charming man," it says on the first page, only to praise "his sense of modesty" two paragraphs later.
You can't blame Arthus-Bertrand for having a big head. His dramatic aerial photography in The Earth from the Air has sold 2.5 million copies worldwide, probably the record for a photographic book. The instantly recognisable cover image is of the "heart of Voh", in New Caledonia. "When I first saw this heart-shaped island down in the mangroves, I knew it would be the symbol of my work," he says.
The French first lady, Bernadette Chirac, recently told Arthus-Bertrand that The Earth from the Air is her husband's favourite book. When Chirac received Condoleezza Rice, the US secretary of state, at the Élysée Palace this winter, the book was there in news photographs, on a coffee table in front of the politicians. Arthus-Bertrand was pleased to see his book on the president's table, "but it's not going to change the world".
His eyes dart around the room and stop on a poster of smiling African children, taken from above. "That's what makes me happy," he says. "We're printing two million of these posters. That poster will be in every French school, through a project with the ministries of the environment and education and the post office." The poster is part of Arthus-Bertrand's biggest project, called 6 Billion Others. He has already recycled €1 million of profits from The Earth from the Air into dispatching five video cameramen around the world to conduct 10,000 half-hour interviews. "It's to find out why, when everyone wants the same things, we can't manage to live together," Arthus-Bertrand explains. "The more countries are at war, the more people say they want to live in peace. Of course, we won't get an answer; it would be ridiculous to think we'd get [ even] the beginning of an answer. But it's interesting to try."
As with most of Arthus-Bertrand's work, the questions posed in 6 Billion Others - What does family mean to you? What makes you happy? What is the meaning of life? - straddle the borderline between profound and trite. But they are accessible to everyone.
Art critics and other photographers sometimes criticise Arthus-Bertrand for shooting pretty coffee-table books and postcards. "You can't please everyone," he shrugs. "When a photographer succeeds . . . I don't mind making postcard-like images. After all, it's a message you send to someone you like. At the beginning it used to bother me. What is important is that you're honest at heart. If you are, you don't care. Today I've got beyond that . . . I'm buoyed by projects [ such as 6 billion Others]. You mustn't have too much of an ego. You have to be like a Buddhist."
Arthus-Bertrand describes himself as a photographe engagé - a committed photographer. With rare exceptions, his photos are beautiful, often breathtakingly so. His images of the brightly coloured outdoor vats for dying leather in Marrakesh are stunning, but when you go there the stench is overwhelming, and the leather workers live in dire poverty.
"In The Earth from the Air we show rubbish dumps and Chernobyl," Arthus-Bertrand says, as if trying to make excuses. "We've done earthquakes and hurricanes. I've just returned from the tsunami. But photographers always have a tendency to make things aesthetic. Emotion is conveyed more easily through beauty. We make beautiful books, but the texts are very committed."
Few readers, I suspect, actually ponder the worthy texts, commissioned by Arthus-Bertrand to decry excessive military spending and global warming. He loves nature, and he is committed to ecology, but it is in the most anodyne way. He no longer votes for the French Green party ("too politicised"), understands the US refusal to ratify the Kyoto Accords on greenhouse emissions ("impossible for their economy") and hasn't made up his mind about nuclear energy.
Photography, Arthus-Bertrand tells me, is an easy way of expressing oneself artistically. "But the big secret is that you have to work very hard. There's a kind of megalomaniac obsession among photographers, as among artists. It can drive other people crazy." Young Yann nearly drove his parents crazy. "I was kicked out of seven different schools," he boasts. "My mother and I counted them up the other day. I crossed off adults early on; I'd figured out that what they were going to teach me didn't work for me."
Photography is a profession for the curious, he says. "In my time, it was also a profession of escape. You escaped your family, your education . . ." Today's young people are paralysed by anxiety, Arthus-Bertrand says. He never doubted himself. "I have the quality of being somewhat careless. Nothing worried me. Life belonged to me; everything was open. I was certain that everyone would think what I did was great, that I was going to make a success of my life."
After leaving home at 17, to work as a film actor, Arthus-Bertrand took a job as a warden in an animal reserve in central France. It was there he discovered his love of nature. He admired the conservationists Jane Goodall and Dian Fossey, and in 1979 he, his wife, Anne, and her two children went to live in Kenya for three years. The couple wrote Lions, about the pride they followed daily. It was one of the happiest times of his life, Arthus-Bertrand says.
He learned to recognise each animal by the implantation of whiskers above their mouths. To earn money, he took tourists up in hot-air balloons, almost accidentally initiating himself to the wonderment ofaerial photography.
Encouraged by his publisher, Hervé de La Martinière, on returning to France, Arthus-Bertrand did aerial books on Paris and New York, which sold about 100,000 copies each. "I discovered it was as much fun flying over Paris as Africa," he says.
Like all of Arthus-Bertrand's work, Horses was a long-term project, started around 1990. "People told me: 'You should make a book about horses, because horses are beautiful,' " he recalls. "Everyone knows horses are beautiful, even people with very little artistic background. If you see a horse running through a field, you say to yourself instinctively: 'That's beautiful.' There aren't many things like that. Man is the only animal to see this beauty."
Arthus-Bertrand is convinced that horses are deeply rooted in our subconscience. "Man has been riding for 1,000 years," he says. "Imagine the world a century ago without horses: everything would have stopped. We've forgotten that. We're letting breeds die out. We've gone from work horses to pleasure horses, from horses for men to horses for women. Today, it's women who ride horses. Eighty per cent of the people in federations are women. When I do book signings, 90 per cent are for girls. The world of horses has become a woman's world."
Arthus-Bertrand used the same large brown canvas as a backdrop for all of his horse portraits. "It's a method that has come down through the history of photography," he says. "Nadar [ the great French portraitist] worked with a backdrop. I just adopted the very old principle of isolating the subject. As a photographer, you constantly try to invent things that other people aren't doing." He particularly likes what he calls the bâches décalées - when the backdrop and subject form only a part of the image, like a stage, with the countryside of Mongolia, Iceland or Africa surrounding them. It is technically difficult. Because the spotlights illuminating the subject must be more powerful than natural light, the shots can be taken only towards nightfall.
Sometimes, Arthus-Bertrand says, he felt silly hanging his brown backdrop amid splendid settings, no more so than at the Aga Khan's stables in Co Kildare. A beautiful mare poses under a vast sycamore tree, with cattle grazing in the background. "The Aga Khan was one of the few owners of expensive horses who let us take photos," Arthus-Bertrand says. "In France [ the industrialist and press magnate] Lagardère refused. People were afraid we would frighten their horses. The Aga Khan's employees were not very enthusiastic; these horses are worth so much money."
A French stallion named Igloo stands next to a red-jacketed groom. The horse's mouth is wide open, all teeth and tongue, his nostrils flared. Igloo is laughing, I say. "Actually, he's yawning," Arthus-Bertrand corrects me. "But of course horses laugh. Why shouldn't animals think? Why shouldn't they feel sorrow? When I was in Kenya the other day, a baby giraffe had been killed by lions. The mother ran to and fro, looking for him. She was obviously suffering."
Templado, the Spanish Lusitanian stallion that magnificently shakes its mane on the inside covers of Horses, reminds me of a woman tossing her hair. Again, Arthus-Bertrand corrects me: "When a woman shakes her head like that, she is imitating the horse," he laughs.
In Montana five cowboys posed with their Quarter Horses for Arthus-Bertrand. "These are real cowboys, wearing the clothes they wear every day: no staging," he says proudly. The horses kept losing interest in the camera. In the published photograph the animals look straight at you, alert, their ears pricked up. "We developed a whole range of tactics to keep their ears up: whistles, slamming doors. A horse with his ears down doesn't look right."
One of the most beautiful sequences in Horses is of Adnan Al Shaqab, an Arabian thoroughbred, photographed in Qatar. The horse seems to dance in front of the camera. "I love this series," Arthus-Bertrand says. "This little Arab horse just started playing, on his own. It was very easy. I was there; all I had to do was push the shutter. A photograph is always a gift that you receive. It's not something you've prepared. You can only show and photograph what you see."
Horses is published by Thames & Hudson, £35