In February 1974, Faye Dunaway was named “Woman of the Year” by Harvard’s Hasty Pudding Club. According to Newsweek, “she was honored with a motorcade, a brass pudding pot and the stimulation of a question-and-answer session with Harvard types. Q: Why didn’t you shave your armpits in a Vogue layout? Faye: ‘I didn’t want to.’ Waddaya think of Bebe Rebozo? ‘I don’t have any opinion on Bebe Rebozo.’ ”

After the ceremony, a 22-year-old senior named Jean Christophe Pigozzi—the same student who, though not a club member, had asked the honoree about her underarm hair—sidled up to Dunaway, held out his Leica M4, aimed its wide-angle lens somewhere between the two of them, and took what we would now call a selfie.

And, over the next four decades, he took hundreds more with other famous actors and actresses, artists and art dealers, filmmakers, fashion designers, writers, rock stars, superagents, athletes, royals, models, moguls, publicists, journalists, comedians, scene-sters, gadflies, and miscellaneous personalities who defined international celebrity and social life in the late 20th and early 21st centuries—as well as his barber, a Turkish belly dancer, a busload of Japanese tourists, Andy Warhol’s stuffed dog, an Oscar, and a B.L.T.

“There were people taking self-portraits for a hundred years. They would put the camera on a tripod and they would have a long tube with a little pump and you’d press it and take your picture,” Pigozzi says. “But people doing it the way I did it? I never saw anybody doing that.” That doesn’t mean it didn’t happen, of course. But Pigozzi’s body of work in the genre—brought together for the first time in ME + CO, out next month from Damiani—is unequaled. Verily, he is the rightful selfie king.

Pigozzi with Iman in 1977. Photograph by Jean Pigozzi.

‘I started taking pictures very early,” Pigozzi, who grew up in Paris, says. “My father [Henri, who started the French car company SIMCA] gave me his old, very difficult-to-use Leica when I was about 10 or 11. I took pictures of dogs or people around me. I was always very interested in having a journal of my life, but I can’t read my own handwriting. I would write things down, and then . . . you know. . . This way, I could record everything I did and I saw.” Eventually Pigozzi would carry a camera around with him “360 days a year.”

He enrolled as a freshman at Harvard in the fall of 1970. “I think the only conventional thing Johnny did at Harvard was he joined one of the eating clubs,” says Jeff Sagansky, a classmate and friend who became an entertainment executive. “Now so many of the students are foreign, but then it was rather unusual. It was still a northeastern school. Johnny completely stood out. Everybody knew him, or knew of him. And yet he wasn’t somebody who participated in a lot of extracurricular activities—at least not organized Harvard extracurricular activities. He would disappear on weekends and go down to New York and come back with these incredible stories and these incredible pictures.” On such weekends, Pigozzi flew Eastern Air Lines (“It cost $17 for students, and you could pay on the plane”) and stayed with his friend Delfina Rattazzi, a well-connected member of the Agnelli family who kept an apartment on the Upper East Side.

Robert Fulton III, a visual-studies professor and filmmaker distantly related to the famous steamboat builder, introduced Pigozzi to Robert Frank’s The Americans. “[Frank] took pictures of people in diners, or sitting in their car, or waiting around offices, and that’s what I found so fantastic,” Pigozzi says. “His pictures are about the normal, not any kind of drama or basketball players jumping. He got the Guggenheim [Fellowship] and traveled across America. I was stuck at Harvard, so I took pictures of what was around. I’m a very lazy photographer.”

A Lifetime of Selfies with Jean Pigozzi



1 / 20 Chevron Chevron Photograph by Jean Pigozzi. Candice Bergen, 1977

“The other students would go and take beautiful pictures of trees in Maine,” Pigozzi says. “I took pictures of dogs with a flash in their face. Nobody was doing that. I did an entire series on cars that were damaged in accidents. In Cambridge, because of the snow, a lot of cars would crash into each other. I never tried to do pretty pictures.”