Pierre et Gilles: Double Je, 1976–2007

The summa of Pierre et Gilles' first thirty years, published by Taschen to accompany the duo's 2007 retrospective Double Je at the Galerie Nationale du Jeu de Paume in Paris: a devotional survey of the hand-painted photographs in which camp, pop, religious iconography, and queer desire fuse into a single, meticulously constructed glamour.

Nearly 460 pages gather work from 1976 through 2007, from early portraits of friends and lovers to the icon-making images of Iggy Pop, Madonna, Nina Hagen, Catherine Deneuve, Laetitia Casta, Marilyn Manson, and Mireille Mathieu, alongside a run of self-portraits and an illustrated biography. Paul Ardenne contributes the main text and Jeff Koons the introduction, in English, French, and German. The black boards carry the artists' names in silver glitter script above their 1991 self-portrait as space-suited cosmonauts adrift in flowers, a cover as staged and tender as the pictures inside the volume itself is a monumental quarto weighing over three kilograms.

Pierre Commoy (b. 1950, La Roche-sur-Yon), a photographer, and Gilles Blanchard (b. 1953, Le Havre), a painter, have been partners in life and work since meeting in Paris in 1976. Their method has never varied: sitters are photographed in elaborate sets built by hand in the artists' studio, and the resulting unique print is painted over until photography and painting are inseparable. Retrospectives at the Maison Européenne de la Photographie (1996), the New Museum in New York (2000), and the Jeu de Paume mark their institutional standing Taschen's earlier volumes The Complete Works 1976–1996 and Sailors & Sea chart the same territory this book completes. They are represented by Galerie Templon, Paris.