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Arno Bani Photoshoot

Date range confirmed in “Agence France-Presse” (archived) (“Photographs were taken in Paris in July 1999”) and further confirmed on “Michaelmania.com” (“On 3 and 4 July 1999”)

“Agence France-Presse” (June 22, 2010) (archived)

Twelve new photos of Michael Jackson taken in 1999 go under the hammer in Paris in December along with 700 contact sheets of the pop legend never before seen in public, auctioneers said Tuesday.

Auction house Pierre Berge & Associes said the photographs were taken in Paris in July 1999 by French photographer Arno Bani on a request from Jackson who had seen his work in the Sunday Times magazine, Style.

The pictures, which are to be published in October worldwide, were supposed to have illustrated his 2001 "Invincible" album but the record company finally used other shots for the album cover.

In the only photograph shown to reporters Tuesday, Jackson is wearing a shiny Yves Saint-Laurent dinner suit and has blue make-up on one eye.

“The Star” (November 9, 2010) (archived)

Parisian photographer Arno Bani is auctioning 90 unseen pictures of the King of Pop, taken in 1999 supposedly for his Invincible album.

...In Bani’s collection, there is one image showing Jackson with one of his closed eyes painted with blue glitter. This “Blue-eyed Michael” is vintage Jackson in terms of drama, glitz and glitter – personifying a life lived in front of the camera. This picture is child-like, beguiling and innocent though offset by a classic jacket sprinkled with tiny circles, some of them mirrored – perchance to reflect his Man In The Mirror hit.

The most dramatic and sensational is the Caped Michael image showing his super smooth face, painted brows and sexy, slightly droopy eyes staring intensely at the camera and wrapped in a golden, quilted cloak...

Face on the cover

...One day in April 1999, he was in a palatial bedroom in a grand London hotel when he saw the cover of Style, the Sunday Times magazine. To him, the face on the cover was sublime in its luminosity and sexlessness, a look he had strived to achieve as few red-blooded men wore as much make-up as he did. The Style cover showed a face plastered with silvery, shiny powder, iridescent and mutely impassive and impressive with its lack of expression. Wearing a stiff, golden shawl, the model resembled a byzantine Madonna.

It was the androgynous beauty that floored Michael Jackson. “This is it!” he must have exclaimed as he visualised himself in similar get-up. The face on the cover belonged to Astrid Munoz, one of the first Latinas to break through as a model in Paris back in 1995. In 2006, Hello Spain magazine ranked her as one of the world’s most beautiful women.

Michael Jackson quickly summoned the creator of this spell-binding image – an unknown 23-year-old Parisian photographer named Arno Bani. The talented Bano was discovered by Isabella Blow – Sunday Times editor, prophetess of fashion, and discoverer of mad hatter Philip Treacy, model Sophie Dahl and designer Alexander McQueen.

Bani was summoned to the Waldorf Astoria New York. Jackson and him connected instantly, like two kids.

“The images were heavily styled and not spontaneous but that was Michael,” says Bani. “Everything had to be perfect. I was given carte blanche to come up with ideas. I was young, just turned 23, but he was more of a kid than I was. He asked me to dream, to play with haute couture, it was like solving a jigsaw puzzle.”

Lying on their stomachs on the carpet of the suite, the pair set about exploring Bani’s catalogue of photos. Bani would photograph the singer for the album cover of Invincible and Jackson would be like the phantasmagorical figure on the cover of Style magazine.

So began two months of hyper, interactive collaboration between a fascinated photographer and a veteran entertainer in an atmosphere of playful euphoria.

“I lived in a waking dream,” recalls Bani. “I played You Are Not Alone a million times.”

The shoot in Paris was conducted in utmost secrecy and Jackson posed over 700 times. The short cropped hair made Jackson seemed even more waif-like and the incisively low-cut neckline seemed like a take on YSL’s Le Smoking Jacket for women, worn with nothing inside.

But in the end, despite the megastar calling up Bani to say how much he loved the photos, they were not used for Invincible – Jackson’s 10th and last studio album released in his lifetime.

The album cover art turned out to be a simple, straightforward close-up picture of the man.

“Michaelmania.com” (August 8, 2010) (archived) (translated from Italian)

On 3 and 4 July 1999, in a recording studio near Paris, Michael Jackson and a young fashion photographer, Arno Bani, began a brief collaboration, the time of a photo session, for a series of shots intended for the cover of the King of Pop’s next album, scheduled for the new millennium. Michael Jackson had discovered the work of him, then twenty-three, in the fashion pages of the Sunday Times, remaining so captivated as to give him carte blanche in carrying out the project.

However, Sony believed that the portraits made on that occasion were not appropriate to appear on the Invincible cover. Their aesthetic and intimate cut, which had so impressed the singer, was rejected in favor of an obvious and commercial image. Until now unpublished and jealously guarded by the secret, they will be auctioned in Paris, at Drouot, on December 13th. The news, released on June 25 last, exactly a year after the death of Michael Jackson, caused a huge sensation among the millions of fans of the entire planet.

The Ippocampo has acquired the rights to the Italian edition of the auction catalog, which Hachette and Pierre Bergé Associés will launch around the world on October 15th. The photographs will be exhibited, before the auction, in New York, Berlin and Milan.

The work brings together 182 photographs, divided into four themes or "scenarios", each of which is defined by an ambiance and a particular vertiginous style:

Blue Eye, Gold, Black on red background, Embroidery and sequins.

The large portraits are accompanied by numerous contact plates, annotated by the same hand as Michael Jackson. The only photo released to the media before the event is the one destined to be the cover of the book: Jackson appears there, an eye made up of blue, in a hieratic pose, the body wrapped in a tuxedo by Yves St Laurent.