Interview

Phillips de Pury & Company specializes in high-end fashion photography, and have held both exhibitions and auctions in their New York and European spaces for Guy Bourdin, Mario Testino, Annie Leibovitz and Helmut Newton. Yet auction house head and auctioneer Simon de Pury hasn't not exhibited his own photographs until now—when he unveiled them for his PUREPURYGRAPHY show at Berlin's The Corner concept store on Friday night. (LEFT: COURTESY SIMON DE PURY)

Most of the 40 large-scale, single-print photographs on view are pleasing colorful abstract images that de Pury took during his travels over the years, and melded into a slick, softback catalogue akin to those produced for the auction-house's top shows. The breathless PR material coos that "PUREPURYGRAPHY is synopsis and extension, allurement and coolness, bewilderment and calm—a myriad of paradoxes through which Simon de Pury establishes yet another of his many personifications; that of a passionate and widely-off-the-beaten-track photographer."

Only a few of the images evoke the same passion that apparently compelled him to take them, but de Pury undoutedly has a clever eye for graphic detail. He zones in on the grille of Russell Simmons's Bentley and the pattern on a soccer ball, rendering both like a the designs of Middle Eastern mashribiya decorative windows. And he captures the pink puffs of a socialette's carpet with the type of micro-filming usually associated with medical imagery, making the rug resemble velvety healthy vaginal flesh. The images of leaves and rainy city-streets mixed into his oeuvre are nice but unremarkable images. However, de Pury has a gift for getting close and turning both luxury and ordinary objects into sci-fi decorative visions.

And the additional "personification" that De Pury brought out at the opening inspired exuberance. Guided by his son Charlie, the debonair De Pury held center stage as DJ throughout the night. Earphones plugged, he swayed at his perch above the make-shift dance floor in the multi-level showroom and urged the affluent Berliners to dance to his blend of Madonna, Beyonce, Diana Ross, and Totally 80's greats. "Simon likes to get power bidding and he wants power dancing," said a fashion journalist Melissa Dryer. On the floor, Barbara Becker, Boris Becker's ex-wife and German tabloid mainstay, was an event in herself, masterfully moving her magnificent muscular body like a new star of Rent. Becker lured a group of older gentleman to the dance floor, turning the party into a blissful Bar Mitzvah-style bash. And beyond all the bopping, the sweetest part of the party was identified by one local designer—who beamed that "it is so nice to all gather here and help someone we love live their dreams!" Sold!