«ANYONE CAN TAKE A GOOD PICTURE»

PARIS — When Karl Lagerfeld joined Chanel in the 1980s, he was so picky about the advertising photos on offer he was told to go shoot them himself. He took the bait, kicking off a love affair with the art form."Back in those days, press photos for fashion collections existed, but they would be shot either by beginners, or has-beens," he told AFP ahead of the opening of a major exhibition of his photography in Paris. «One season, in 1987, Chanel's image director showed me one, two press packs -- and at the third he said, 'If you are so difficult, why don't you do it yourself'," said the German fashion maestro, now in his late seventies. To begin with he was, he says, "an absolute beginner, like people who snap pictures with their mobile phones today".But the experiment took off -- and with it grew a passion for alternative and in some cases long-forgotten developing techniques, and their effects on grain, colour and texture, all on ample display in the Paris show.For six weeks starting Wednesday, the French capital's Maison Europeenne de la Photographie is exhibiting some 400 of Lagerfeld's images, shot around the world, "mostly with a basic little Fuji, that I can carry around with me."