Jane & Serge: A Family Album
photography by Andrew Birkin
edited by Alison Castle
Je t’aime...moi non plus
The Jane Birkin and Serge Gainsbourg family album
The Jane Birkin and Serge Gainsbourg family album
I met Andrew Birkin when I was researching Stanley Kubrick's work on the Napoleon project. Kubrick's location/research scout, as it turns out, was a young photographer (and later filmmaker) who happened to be the brother of Jane Birkin. Stanley sent him all over Europe to photograph any and every possible location relating to Napoleonic history, for which Birkin eventually shot over 17,000 slides. After work on the Napoleon book wrapped up, Andrew contacted me to ask if I had "any interest" in his trove of personal photos of his sister and Serge Gainsbourg spanning their entire relationship. My answer was a resounding "yes!" I convinced him that we should collaborate with M/M (Paris) for the design and got to work crawling through his impressive archive of Jane and Serge photos. The result marries a minimalist, small format book and its separate text booklet with hand-illustrated bonuses (an embroidered sew-on patch, a fold-out poster, and a sheet of stickers) as well as a selection of reproduction contact sheets and prints—all tucked into the book's plastic cover.
