YVES SAINT LAURENT: LES DERNIERS JOUR DE BABYLONE, Photographs by by Luc Castel, text by Dominique Baqué

Editions du Regard, 2013, First edition, 108 pp., 9 1/4" X 11 1/4", Hardcover

Fine in near fine+ dust jacket

The legendary apartment on Rue de Babylone has been deserted since Yves Saint Laurent's death. Silence reigns. Pierre Bergé allows Luc Castel to photograph it one last time. A testimonial task. To document what the apartment of the couple, Pierre Bergé and Yves Saint Laurent, was like before the big auction. Luc Castel's photographs thus become: "A faithful document of what happened, not just on the day of the move—as was planned—but for a month, day after day, from mid-January to mid-February 2009, until the famous sale of the collection at the Grand Palais and the exhibition that preceded it. But a documentary that is paradoxically both very modest and animated by a melancholic, elegiac breath, a true photographic writing, as if one could not escape the presence, in these places, of the grim reaper." After speaking with Pierre Bergé, Dominique Baqué delivers a subtle text, matching her steps to those of Luc Castel, whose photographs of rare accuracy guide us into the apartment closed in its secrets, tomb of an incredible passion and an immoderate love of beauty.  -From the publisher