MICHEL DE YOUGOSLAVIE
PHOTOGRAPHIE
I choose a precise theme like
"fruit in the city" or
"urban perspectives"…
"Then I go out and take photos.”
“At each trip I would visit art fairs. I was reunited with a whole group of friends in all these large cities…During these years, I would sharpen my look on art, paintings, but also on photography.”
During 20 years, constant traveller, Michel always has his camera with him. A digital Leica, with which he works between one and two hours a day. “I have a daily discipline. I choose a precise theme like ‘fruit in the city’ or ‘urban perspectives’… Then I go out and take photos.”
His photos are like him: well groomed, rigorous, where every detail is thought of, a bit “like a painting”. Very curious, Michel de Yougoslavie is a photographer of detail and proximity. Reflection of a open mind as well as slightly offset, whose humor is always present. After 20 years of silent pursuit, Michel de Yougoslavie finally gets out of the woods and exposes his work for the first time in Geneva in 2014. His photographs, limited to 7 prints only, are already a success.
Catherine Nivez
Journalist in Geneva
Everywhere in Europe, Michel de Yougoslavie is at home.
The fall of the wall in 1989 could have opened the perspective of a return in the former Yugoslavia.
But Michel de Yougoslavie, freshly graduated from the European Business School in Paris, leaves to live the American Dream.
After six months of training in a bank in Mexico City, and six more months in Brazil, he stops for a vacation in the United States: “I was in Florida, and after a week on the beach I got bored. I then started to work in the luxury real estate , a bit by hazard, and I stayed 10 years.”
A decade of successful commercial deals were followed by ten more years in New York. These were sumptuous times during which Michel de Yougoslavie continues to travel intensively, and watches.
In his early years, Michel de Yougoslavie also learns to look. The long walks in the castle of Versailles with his mother. The classical elegance of perspectives and volumes…
”Since we were not rich, rather than buying, my mother was often changing the place of the furniture. Volumes and perspectives were always evolving…”
From his mother, Michel de Yougoslavie descends from a family all the way as illustrious:
Umberto II, his maternal grandfather
was the last King of Italy; he reigned 35 days, in 1946.
Exiled also, he lived in Portugal while his wife Marie Josée went to Switzerland in Gy, near Geneva.
Michel would regularly visit them.
“I have a daily discipline "
