Christian Coigny Art Prints

Christian Coigny was born in Lausanne in 1946. At 20, he enrolled at the School of Photography in Vevey, but very quickly grew impatient and left Switzerland for five years, during which he discovered advertising, primarily in San Francisco where he lived between 1969 and 1974. He discovered the painters, Georgia O'Keeffe, Edward Hopper and Richard Dibenkorn whose work of the light and spaces of the American west, influenced him greatly. He returned to Switzerland and settled on the shores of Lake Geneva. Many pieces of his work was used in several campaign posters he created for high-end fashion department stores and jewelry brands. Then began a long adventure of eight years during which he photographed over 130 personalities. Working the studios of David Hockney in Los Angeles, to the home of William Burroughs in Kansas, to cramped hotel rooms in Seattle, to the rooftops of New York, he often played the music of Lou Reed, while he worked. Today, anxious not to be cataloged only as portrait photographer, Christian Coigny insists that the personal work he considers to be the most indispensable, also linked with advertising photography.