Jean-Paul Goude
“I regularly ask myself about the status of my work and the classification of what I do,” says Jean-Paul Goude. “How relevant is my work, and does it correspond to the life of an artist – even as I conceived it? Is it art or something else? I still don’t know if I’ll ever find an answer.”

Who can blame him? Jean-Paul Goude is an eccentric talent, and he’s turned his skills to many different applications over the years, including art direction, photography, moving images and even performance art, by way of his formidable former girlfriend and muse, Grace Jones.

Goude was born in 1940 in a small suburb of Paris to a French father and American mother who had both been involved with showbiz in New York. His mother ran a dance school, preparing the ground for a lifelong obsession with the dynamism of movement and form, and his precocious talent for drawing became apparent early on. He studied at the Ecole Nationale Supérieure des Arts Décoratifs in Paris and embarked on a career as an illustrator before fate came knocking on his door in 1968 in the shape of Harold Hayes, editor of US Esquire from 1963-73. He asked Goude to art direct a special edition of the magazine to celebrate its 75th issue. But Goude soon started to work full time, becoming art editor despite having little experience of layouts. Aged just 25, he was already one of America’s creative elite.

Then he ran into Grace Jones on New York’s disco scene and became her manager and lover, stage-managing outrageous live shows and creating groundbreaking album covers. A keen proponent of retouching long before computer manipulation, he depicted her in an impossible pose for her Island Life album.

“I photographed her in a variety of positions, which I combined into a montage that made it possible to show her simultaneously full-frontal and in profile, like an Egyptian bas-relief,” he says. “Then, having transferred the montage to photographic paper, I used it as the preliminary sketch for a painting meant to give the photographic illusion that she alone, like a contortionist, could assume the pose, though on a closer look you can see that from a strictly anatomical point of view the pose is impossible to achieve.”

It’s an approach Goude has adopted with many of his muses, adapting their images to show what he describes as his real conception of their beauty, not the one directly visible. It’s got him into hot water because his idealised women have sometimes followed rather cartoonish racial stereotypes, and the name of his first book – Jungle Fever, published in 1982 – also attracted criticism. He argues he’s a man of form, and that his work tackles a political problem in an aesthetic way. He’s certainly nothing if not even-handed – when asked to create a parade for the anniversary of the French revolution in 1989, he doused the British contingent with water (because “everyone knows it always rains in England”), and asked Senegalese tribal dancers to interpret Swan Lake.

Goude’s first ad was a TV spot for Lee Cooper jeans in 1982, which he tackled in typically
irreverent style, creating a 10-minute mini opera set to Stravinsky’s Rites of Spring. He’s also shot TV ads for Kodak, Azzedine Alaia, Perrier, Cacharel and Chanel, to name just a few, putting Vanessa Paradis in a birdcage for the latter because he thought she looked like Tweety-Pie.

His most celebrated print campaigns have been for Galeries Lafayette, the leading Parisian
department store he’s worked with for more than 10 years. The company is no stranger to strong art directors – previous campaigns were directed by Jean Widmer (a student of Bauhaus teacher Johannes Itten) and Peter Knapp – but with access to “Mr Galeries Lafayette himself”, Goude has been given considerable creative freedom. He’s opted to shoot the on-going adventures of “a comic book character, half way between Herge’s Tintin and a heroine of an early Pearl Buck novel”.

And perhaps that’s the point. With Goude you don’t get reality, you get a slice of his singularly creative mind. As a child, he says, his father would try to teach him the difference between fact and fiction, while his mother would argue, “Let the kid dream”. Then his father would say, “No, this is ridiculous. This child has to know what’s right and wrong; what is fantasy and what is reality”. And with that “my mother and I would start crying”. Luckily, he never quite got the hang of it.

Jean-Paul Goude is represented by Hasted Hunt Kraeutler. So Far So Goude (ISBN: 978-0-500-51240-1) and The Goude Touch – A Ten Year Campaign for Galeries Lafayette (ISBN: 978-0-500-51486-3) are both published by Thames & Hudson, priced £40.

Erik Kessels
Erik Kessels is nothing if not left-field. Kessels Kramer, the Amsterdam-based communications agency he founded with creative partner Johan Kramer in 1996, doesn’t have a regular website. Instead it’s represented online by a series of spoof sites advertising everything from gospel jewellery to boxes of live butterflies to be released at weddings, funerals and bar mitzvahs. If you do manage to get through to the agency by telephone, you might be invited to “press 1 for better sex” among the list of hold options.

The agency’s most celebrated ad campaign, for the Hans Brinker Budget Hotel, took a similarly unconventional approach, flagging up its dirty, worn-out bedrooms. With a product that bad, Kessels reasoned, there was no hiding the flaws, and amazingly it worked, helping double its number of bookings over the next 10 years.

Kessels Kramer’s client list also embraces brands with rather bigger reputations to risk, and the companies who’ve taken the plunge with this seemingly unpredictable talent include Diesel (above), for whom it has created a series of award-winning campaigns lampooning conventional fashion advertising, alongside Absolut Vodka, MTV, Heineken and Nike, which Kessels Kramer got to support a 78-year-old athlete as part of its ambush marketing of the Adidas-sponsored Berlin Marathon.

The agency operates on the principle that any medium can be used to advertise a brand as long as it’s relevant, so its work encompasses a broad spectrum from documentary films to guerrilla promotions. But photography is also central to its work and, in particular, to Kessels himself. A keen collector of amateur photographs, he’s published several books of “found” snapshots, and Kessels is one of five editors of Useful Photography, a magazine dedicated to vernacular imagery whose themes have included such diverse subjects as pornography, war and images culled from internet auction sites. Prints from his collection are currently on show at the Centre National de l’Audiovisuel in Luxemburg in an exhibition devoted to tourist photography, and he’s collaborated with that most obsessive of collectors, Martin Parr.

These activities are separate to his day job in advertising but they’re not unconnected, because while the images he collects have kitsch amusement value, to him they’re more than just cheap gags. “I like images by amateurs because they haven’t yet learnt how they are supposed to do things,” he explains. “I don’t often use them in adverts, but I have learnt a lot from amateurs’ work. For adverts, I like to make images that play with the established rules for advertising. For instance, if you’re shooting a car you are supposed to shoot it in this particular way. The same goes for any number of products. We often try and use the kind of image that doesn’t follow the established rules – like selecting the one frame from the series where the model has her eyes closed.”

It’s an irreverent, ironic take on photography and advertising, but it only works in certain places. Apparently Britain, Germany, the Netherlands, Belgium and Scandinavia usually get it, but southern Europeans are often left scratching their heads.

Oliviero Toscani
If advertising is about attracting attention, then Oliviero Toscani is the medium’s Andy Warhol. In fact, the photographer turned art director spent some time at Warhol’s Factory in New York before establishing himself as one of Italy’s leading fashion shooters. And the artist’s disregard for any division between art and commerce seems to have rubbed off on him.

In 1982 he was given full creative control to design the adverts for a family-run clothing business based in Treviso, and over the next 18 years he transformed Benetton’s fortunes. He came up with the United Colors of Benetton campaign, which began featuring children from different cultures and races in brightly-coloured clothes. But it wasn’t long before his ads had moved on to include ever more controversial subject matter, from a bloody new-born baby to a priest and a nun kissing, and perhaps most iconic of all, a photograph taken just moments after the death of a man suffering from AIDS, surrounded by his grieving family.

The campaigns, which helped multiply Benetton’s sales by a factor of 20 in his time there, brought the company huge publicity, but also much criticism for its alleged exploitation in the cause of selling jumpers. And in 2001 Toscani’s provocative approach came back to bite him after he used images of prisoners from America’s Death Row in his ads. When the parents of a young boy raped and murdered by one of the prisoners saw the ads, they began a boycott campaign that eventually led to one of the biggest clothing chains in the US cancelling its contract with Benetton.

Toscani left soon after and remains unrepentant, disappointed with Benetton, who “put the money first”, and dismissive of the campaigns he created for them. “The work for Benetton isn’t my best, I’m not proud of it,” he says. “I’m not an art director, I’m a photographer. I only got involved with Benetton because they approached me.”

Despite this, he’s stuck with advertising since his departure, and is still creating controversial work. In 2005, for example, he portrayed smiling same-sex couples in a campaign for men’s clothing brand Ra-Re, once again igniting the ire of Italy’s conservative right wing (Catholic parents’ association Movimento Italiano Genitori called the pictures “vulgar”, for example) and stoking the flames of the ongoing debate on gay rights in Italy.

Two years later, his shocking photographs of French actress Isabelle Caro, revealing the full extent of her anorexia, were splashed across poster sites and the media in an advert for another clothing company, No-l-ita, just as Italian Fashion Week opened for business. The ad was summarily banned by Italy’s advertising watchdog, and Toscani announced he would be suing for damages.

For Toscani, advertising is just a tool, and one ripe for subversion. “Advertising is disgusting, but it’s powerful,” he comments. “Through it you can reach many people.”

He’s also dismissive of suggestions that his images would sit better in editorial pages than ads, arguing that editorial is just as corrupt as advertising. “Editorial is just advertising of advertising,” he says. “They are both the same – both are advertising some agenda. The powerful have always used images to communicate their message. In the Renaissance the Church had [Leonardo] Da Vinci. People had no newspapers, no books, nothing, so they would go to the Church and be amazed.”

Besides, he adds, great suffering and frivolous luxury live side by side in the media and the world it reflects, it’s just that we refuse to accept the fact. By combining the two in advertising, he says he’s just being honest. “Every time you open a newspaper you see images of starving children on one page opposite images of new cars,” he says. “We all know this contradiction exists but we choose to ignore it.”

It’s an uncompromising line befitting the son of a news photographer – his father worked on Corriere Della Serra, and took a famously macabre picture of Benito Mussonlini’s corpse hanging in a square in Milan the day after his execution in 1945. Having grown up alongside such images, for Toscani they’re just part of life. But that’s not to say he takes them for granted. For him the power of photography is as self-evident as the power of advertising, in a career in which so much has been in called into question. “I don’t want to be an artist – there’s nothing more ridiculous than these photographers who hang their little pictures on the wall,” he says. “You don’t have to try to pretend to be an artist; photography is art.”

Mark Reddy
The head of art at Bartle Bogle Hegarty London, Mark Reddy has bad news for advertising photographers. In the last 18 months most clients have cut their budgets by 20%, and what money is left has to be spread across more types of media. Eight years ago the pot was divided between TV and print, and it was normal for photographers to be given up to 10 spreads on a major campaign, working to a budget of up to £300,000, once or maybe twice a year. No more. Now those campaigns run over two or three ads because the rest of the budget has to cover online marketing too, incorporating virals and guerrilla campaigns.

“Print has lost supremacy in the hierarchy of what’s important,” says Reddy. “The inclination is to be more innovative, so print can seem like the poor cousin.”

Nevertheless, he does have some good news. Car makers are still spending, and fashion advertisers continue to put money into good photography. But it’s of limited help to most photographers – the car clients are increasingly reliant on CGI for their imagery, while fashion advertisers partner with a very select bunch. “I’ve worked with Chadwick Taylor on the Levi’s campaign. He’s so brilliant, and he only picked up a camera five years ago. And Jacob Sutton, he’s a star – I recently worked with him on a fashion advert for Ebay. In fashion I can use these people. In that market print is seen as the indulgent medium – I don’t know any woman who doesn’t have a stash of fashion magazines under the bed. The three or four last campaigns I’ve done with big budgets have been fashion.”

As these comments suggest, Reddy partly puts the changes down to technology, arguing that with small banner ads and poor-quality outdoor screens popping up all over the place, it’s better to go for graphic, text-based work. Spending money on nice photography that will be poorly reproduced, he adds, just doesn’t make any sense. But he also puts it down to a more depressing factor – declining standards in the art directors themselves. “The real reason photography isn’t commissioned so much now is that art directors don’t know or don’t care about it,” he says. “They’ve studied advertising at college rather than art, so they don’t know the history of photography or graphic design. They generate ideas without thinking how to do them, rather than thinking of a particular artist or photographer then working out how to use them. I know photographers and what they can do, and will generate concepts with them in mind. Now people seem to call in about 10 portfolios and choose who to work with almost randomly.”

Axel Chaldecott
You might not have heard of Axel Chaldecott, or “Axe” as he’s more affectionately known, but you’ve definitely seen his work. He helped break the mould of UK advertising in 1987 when he co-founded Howell Henry Chaldecott Lury (HHCL), the agency behind Tango’s notorious 1991 ad campaign. Starring a surreal fruit-shaped character who personified “the taste of real oranges” and delivered Tango drinkers a shocking slap in the face, the ad was blamed for a wave playground violence and subsequently banned.

HHCL was also responsible for Ronseal’s “Does what it says on the tin” campaign, a phrase that has now entered everyday language.

Chaldecott is now employed by JWT, where he’s global creative director and in charge of the $600 HSBC million account. HSBC’s current campaign, “The World’s Local Bank”, has been running for four years now in 50 airports around the world and, he says, photography is central to its message. “It was created by an American creative team called Peter Seterdahl and Michael Hart and was very much inspired by conceptual art and photography. I work a lot with American creatives and have always respected their approach to their craft. They see themselves as the creative end of business, whereas a lot of English teams still see themselves as the commercial end of art.”

Advertising a bank in the current economic climate isn’t easy but, says Chaldecott, the trick is doing as the ad itself suggests – taking a local approach to a global brand. He’s just finished a two-year project looking at how peoples’ values affect their approach to money, for example, in which he found that Germany never took the same easy approach to credit as the UK and the US, despite its economic success. In the UK, however, he’s found that peoples’ attitudes have considerably tightened up, and that despite the government’s attempts to stimulate spending by cutting VAT, they are now hanging onto their cash. “People have had to wean themselves off their habits very quickly,” he comments. “They think twice before buying now.”

As HSBC’s campaign suggests, working with a global company often requires a message that overcomes cultural differences, not least the language barrier. Chaldecott points out this affects what he can do in the apparently universal online world too, but says global brands are looking for more consistent campaigns nonetheless. For him, the combination of image and text remains one of the most powerful ways to communicate. “A brilliant photograph can stop you dead in your tracks, and in combination with a great headline or telling phrase can add up to much more than the sum of the parts,” he says. “The very best campaigns often verge on being visual art.”

Laurence Thompson
Mother launched more than a decade ago, but it’s hung onto its reputation as the enfant terrible of British advertising. With its head office in Shoreditch, where all 120 employees sit around one giant table, it’s also been accused of pretentiousness, but nevertheless it’s got an impressive roster of blue-chip clients on its books, including Coca Cola. It has also worked with many of the country’s leading advertising photographers. Still life specialist Dan Tobin Smith recommended we call Laurence Thompson of Mother saying: “He’s a pleasure to work with and someone who really understands both photography and illustration.”

That he certainly does, but for Thompson, a creative at Mother, that doesn’t necessarily mean hiring professionals for the job. He’s increasingly using amateur photographs, and not just the kind of imagery sourced through enthusiast sites such as Flickr. “We were asked to do something for the Discovery channel a couple of years ago on a very tight budget,” he says. “We decided to build some outdoor sculptures in London, because we knew people would take pictures and talk about them. The programme [London Ink] increased its viewers by 900%. Everyone has a camera in their bag now, and they tweet or blog their images.”

As he points out, this kind of work breaks with traditional conventions and further blurs the distinction between advertising and everyday life. When he’s creating an online presence for a company, for example, he doesn’t just book a month of banner ads. He might create an online magazine, or pull a stunt viewers forward to their friends (although he hesitates to use the word viral). The area he’s most interested in at present is computer games, which as of last September outsold film, including both box-office takings and DVD sales, according to GFK Chart-Track. “If that’s happening, we need to be there,” he says. “Wipeout was the first game to sell advertising space, and now all football games include ads on the perimeter boards.”

Similarly, he’s keen to use more moving imagery as outdoor digital screens improve. Where professional photography fits into this is a moot point. Although Thompson isn’t averse to paying to use images, unfortunately for ad photographers after a good commission, he’s also enthusiastic about a recent campaign that used stock. “We ran a campaign for The Observer using shots of sportspeople in supposedly compromising positions,” he says. “It was very funny, but it only worked because it was for real – I don’t think we would have done it if we’d had to set it up. For sports photography you can’t beat stock.”