Hervé Lewis

Hervé Lewis was born in the south of France in 1954. A former boxer, he first worked as a physical trainer for performers in music and film — Johnny Hallyday, whom he prepared for nearly two decades, Mylène Farmer, whose tours he accompanied from 1989 to 2013, and Jean Reno among them. Photographing the body was a natural extension of that work: self-taught, he began shooting with a manual Nikon FM.

His name is associated with Aubade’s Leçons de séduction, the lingerie brand’s black-and-white campaigns, which he photographed over many years, including the collector calendar for the campaign’s twentieth anniversary (2012–2013). His photographs have also appeared on record sleeves and tour material for Mylène Farmer, notably the cover of Monkey Me (2012).

His books include Belles (Éditions de La Martinière, 2000) and the collective volume L’art d’aimer : 10 ans de leçons de séduction (La Martinière, 2002); his work was featured in Taschen’s The New Erotic Photography. He held his first exhibition at Galerie Albert Benamou, Paris, in 2002, and showed at Art Paris, Grand Palais, in 2009. His series with the sumo champion Musashimaru sets the wrestler’s mass against a model’s slightness — force and sensuality in one frame. More recently his photographs were presented in Shapes & Shades at Bel-Air Fine Art, Lausanne (2023).