Frank Loriou, a member of the renowned Vu photo agency, began his career in photography through music. As head of the graphics department at Virgin Records, he spent several years designing album covers before picking up a camera himself. His unique journey from graphic design to photography would eventually lead to one of the most intimate artistic collaborations in French music.
For a long time, French musician Jean-Louis Murat refused to be photographed by anyone. This changed when he met Frank Loriou, who would go on to create about ten album covers for the artist, continuing until the 2020 release of "Baby Love." Most of their photo shoots took place in Auvergne, the musician's home region in central France. Loriou remembers these sessions as always "picturesque," fondly recalling Murat's playful antics during their work together.
From their two decades of collaboration, Loriou has preserved several hundred images. He has now selected 150 of these photographs, most of them previously unpublished, for his new book "Photorama." Beyond offering an intimate portrait of Jean-Louis Murat, these photographs serve an educational purpose. For each album, Loriou chose to keep all the shots taken, allowing readers to see how an album cover is created from start to finish.
The book combines Loriou's images with text reflecting on their collaboration and friendship. In one particularly revealing passage, Loriou describes a memorable summer morning in 2012 at Douharesse. He had developed a habit of stopping by during the warmer months to discuss world affairs with Jean-Louis and drink chilled rosé. Loriou was consistently impressed by Murat's intellectual freedom and bold theories, well-documented through his extensive reading.
"One morning, through the curtain of the bay window, I saw Jean-Louis pass by on his Decathlon bike from my bed," Loriou recalls. "With his straw hat and a pitchfork, he was going from the lower garden to the upper garden, already up at that early morning hour." Loriou grabbed his camera equipment from his car, threw on some pants, and stopped Murat on the road. "I want to photograph you on your bike. Right here. Right now."
Without changing anything except removing the pitchfork, Murat patiently rode back and forth, appearing calm and detached, seemingly thinking about something else. Under the burning sun of that mid-morning, what Loriou describes as "cowboy Murat" – who would later appear as "Buck John" – performed the strangest and funniest of westerns. The performance was gentle, simple, natural, filled with humor and self-deprecation.
Loriou had long aspired to present Murat this way, believing he would benefit more from being known for his poetry of the moment rather than as a regular guest on talk shows. While Murat enjoyed being a television sniper, he also caused considerable collateral damage, and many people turned away from his music who would have loved it otherwise. This visceral insubordination to the rules of political correctness in a well-behaved and disciplined world was an undeniable part of his charm, his incandescence, and his uniqueness.
Murat's interviews in print media were among the most colorful in the market, featuring witty remarks in every sentence and an acid rain of intelligence and humor. In a 2003 interview with Magic magazine, when Franck Vergeade asked what he thought about free music distribution on the Internet, Murat declared with characteristic bluntness: "I'm scandalized. Everyone steals our songs, internet users are terrible chicken thieves. We should hang one by the balls every day in Place de la Concorde." This was at a time when many artists were signing petitions against criminalization in the name of prohibiting prohibition, effectively cutting off the branch of copyright they were sitting on.
The entire photo session was conducted with Murat wearing his hat. They returned to Émile's house, opening the same window, leaning against the same wall, digging the same furrow, repeating the same gestures – similar yet different, the gestures of craftsmen who put their work back on the workbench every day. Loriou continuously loaded and reloaded his Hasselblad camera, noting that he never photographed Murat with anything but film, and always in July.
They descended to the cellar, lit by a single bulb, without flash or assistant. Then, somehow, they found themselves in Murat's office – a secret temple Loriou had never entered and didn't even know existed. This was where Murat writes, composes, disappears, loses and finds himself again. Kneeling on the floor, Loriou photographed the musician with a guitar in hand, while Murat seemed to forget about the photographer entirely.
Back in his studio, one image quickly stood out to both of them for the album cover: a tableau of Jean-Louis on his bicycle in the middle of the road. Murat requested more grain, more texture, as if he no longer wanted people to see his face clearly but only to sense it. The typography Loriou proposed pleased him, and the "Toboggan" cover was born, later being adapted in a blue version for a special edition.
Interestingly, Loriou didn't know the upcoming album's title when they shot these images on the road that plunged toward the valley. A few days earlier, on the evening of his arrival, while driving in the night a few kilometers from the house, an animal had suddenly appeared. There was a loud, dull sound of bone, fur, and flesh against metal. After a moment of shock, Loriou turned around on the small winding road. In the headlight beams, an enormous badger lay stretched out, thick blood flowing from its skull like lava from a volcano.
The animal's body was heavy, its teeth sharp. Loriou was reluctant to approach it, but the creature's eye was closing gently, and the light was so beautiful that he photographed it. When he told this story to Jean-Louis, the musician took it very seriously. Murat had once been surrounded at night in the mountains, sleeping under the stars with his family, by a pack of badgers. All night long, he had kept them at bay by waving fire at them.
Later, when Loriou presented the "Toboggan" booklet to Murat, the musician discovered the image of the dying badger in the car's headlights. Loriou had slipped it in without warning, and it remained there. They never spoke about it afterward, but as Loriou notes, "Badgers are serious business." The album "Toboggan" was released on March 25, 2013.
"Frank Loriou: Photorama" is published by éditions le BOULON, featuring 204 pages and scheduled for release on October 9, 2025.
