Claude Nori

Claude Nori (b. 1949, Toulouse) is a French photographer and publisher of Italian descent whose parallel activities as image-maker and editor have made him a central figure in the development of contemporary French photography. Drawn initially to cinema — he studied at the Conservatoire du cinéma français — he discovered photography during the events of May 1968 and moved to Paris in 1974, where he founded Contrejour the following year: simultaneously a magazine, a publishing house, and a gallery in Montparnasse.

Contrejour became one of the most important platforms for photographic publication in France, issuing first monographs and foundational books over roughly two decades: Luigi Ghirri's Kodachrome (1978), Bernard Plossu's Le Voyage mexicain (1979), Sebastião Salgado's Autres Amériques, Gilles Peress's Telex Persan, and works by Robert Doisneau, Willy Ronis, Pierre et Gilles, and Jeanloup Sieff, among many others. Nori's own first book, Lunettes (1976), appeared under the Contrejour imprint with a preface by Agnès Varda, a long-standing friend. In 1984 he co-founded the magazine Camera International, and from 1981 to 1994 co-directed the theoretical journal Les Cahiers de la photographie. His own photography has focused on the Mediterranean world — and above all on the Italian summer: the bagni of Rimini, Capri, Stromboli, the rituals of beach culture and youthful sociability — documented over thirty years in close friendship with Luigi Ghirri and Bernard Plossu.

His photobooks include Vacances à l'italienne (Contrejour, 1987), Géométrie du flirt (Contrejour, 2011), and Un photographe amoureux (2014). In 1999 he founded the Terre d'Images festival in Biarritz, where he now lives.