Princess Charlene backstage wedding photo graces cover of Julian Lennon book
Princess Charlene minutes before her wedding © Julian Lennon
Julian Lennon’s recent photo book is called “Life’s Fragile Moments” and features over two decades of fashion, landscape and portrait images. But it was Princess Charlene that he chose for its cover.
Forbes found that choice of cover photo intriguing and devoted a recent article to it.
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More accurately, the photo is of Charlene Lynette Wittstock, as it was taken around 10 minutes before her wedding to Prince Albert II on July 1, 2011. Her friend Julian Lennon was backstage with her, photographing her getting ready.
In the article the Monegasque resident recalls a moment of doubt on the part of the Princess before the wedding. “She just sat, staring, kind of numb in the mirror. She turned to me and said, ‘Jules, I don’t know if I can do this.’ I’m going, ‘What are you talking about?’ She said, ‘I can’t do it, I’m not sure I can do the photographs, there’s too many distractions.’” His response: “Just let me just be a fly on the wall.”
Of the hundreds of photographs he was able to take that day, he loved the photo of Charlene looking in the mirror before her wedding so much he chose it for the cover of Life’s Fragile Moments.
As Lennon explains to Forbes,“I cropped it in a certain way, and I thought, oh my God, there it is; It’s Princess Grace, it’s the 1950s,” he says. “So, I turned all the pictures black and white,” looking for a feel of Time or Life magazine in that era.
The striking image was also used on the homepage for his recent photo retrospective exhibition, Whispers, in Venice.
He explains book’s title, Life’s Fragile Moments, comes from his own experience in life. “It’s about those split seconds in life,” he says, “of people’s lives and things and landscapes around us that change in a heartbeat.”
Like the moment a South African Olympic swimmer became a Monegasque Princess.