Soft dreams, sweet dreams. Filled with the smooth and fragrant skins of delicately perspiring young girls: the flutter of their breath as they toss and stretch against rumpled sheets, their slender thighs aching with a timeless heat that the night breeze cannot assuage. That is the world of David Hamilton.
And in the world of photography, David Hamilton's vision is unique. Ever since the appearance of his first photographs in 1969 in the German magazine Twen, Hamilton has explored, perhaps more thoroughly than any other modern photographer, the nostalgic theme of childhood love and sexual awakening. He was raised by his mother and sisters, and no doubt his predilection for creating a soft, feminine universe stems partly from those early years. No modern photographer has surpassed Hamilton's photographic portraits of emerging womanhood.
His approach contrasts with that of, say, Helmut Newton--another world-famed photographer who specializes in studies of the female form. Newton's world is harsh; his street-wise subjects are not uncommonly fettered. Hamilton's universe is a gentler one; his nymphets are prisoners only of their own innocence. Someone once called Newton the Marquis de Sade of modern photography; if he is, then Hamilton is the genre's Frank Harris.
He chooses to photograph the fairest, most delicately featured, unself-conscious girls he can find. He dresses them simply, surrounds them with subtle illumination and then captures on film the innocent eroticism of their artless though utterly captivating postures. Although he usually shoots his sensitive tableaux in southern France, he often journeys to Sweden in search of models, "because Scandinavian girls are uncomplicated and very natural; they don't have complexes about their bodies."
Hamilton has made three feature films: Bilitis, an "art film" classic starring Patti D'Arbanville (featured in a May 1977 Playboy pictorial photographed by Hamilton titled Our Lady D'Arbanville); Laura: Les Ombres de L'Eté; and now Tender Cousins. These pictures are from the preproduction studies and the still-camera work from that movie.
Tender Cousins is about a teenage boy, Julien, who falls hopelessly and morosely in love with his cousin Julia during a summer at the family country house. Julia, played by German actress Anja Shute, pays very little attention to him. She only has eyes for her older sister's boyfriend, a handsome young officer. It is the beginning of the summer of 1939 and France is preparing for war. When all the men in the village go off to fight, Julien finds himself, suddenly, the only man in this collection of beautiful women. And he learns the special responsibilities and rewards that situation can offer. One of them is his introduction to sex, given by an obliging and beautiful housemaid. His spirits, as one could expect, brighten. Even Julia begins to act differently toward him. Tender Cousins, due out in the United States soon (and also in book form, with text by Pascal Laine), promises to be even more popular than Bilitis (which was one of the most successful French films of 1977).
But more than that, Tender Cousins is Hamilton's most beautifully photographed film, and probably the truest reflection of his inner landscape. "For me," he says, "it's necessary that beauty be very soft."
