Riviera Cocktail: Edward Quinn

No other photographer has captured the far-flung social and cultural life of the Cote dAzur in the fifties with such intelligent verve and remarkably gentle irony as the Irishman Edward Quinn (1920 - 1997). For over a decade, Quinn showed a perfect blend of persistence and discretion in his daring exploration of the social jungle on the French Riviera. In this iridescent epicenter of high life and big business, of art, music and literature, he managed to discover incomparable gems. Riviera Cocktail encompasses an entire age, tracing the path followed by Edward Quinn from his early pin-up photography to his unconventional portrayal of all the great stars and, finally, to his relationships, as a photographer, with Pablo Picasso and Georg Baselitz. In their soundtrack, Franco Ambrosetti and his band European Legacy enter into an exhilarating and compelling dialogue with Quinns visual universe, combining the contemporary with the nostalgic in a compellingly musical compliment to an age that has gone down in history as the Golden Fifties. In 1949 Edward Quinn was barely surviving as a photographer until he finally realized that he could make a living out of his fascination with the beautiful, the rich, and the famous on the Cote dAzur. He soon built up a network of helpful barmen, secretaries, bellhops and service staff at luxury hotels along the coast. Calling himself Edward Quinn, Photographer, Nice, he launched his lifelong career, which, seen through the lens of time, can at last be interpreted and enjoyed as an invaluable photographic evocation of a lost world.