Various photographersLes Romans-Photos du Professeur Choron

Every month for the past ten years, I've been working on what we call "Hara-Kiri Le Choron" at the magazine, because the ever-present star of this photo-novel is Professor Choron. Before me, it was Gébé, the current editor-in-chief of Hara-Kiri, who wrote the scripts for "Professor Choron, Answer to Everything," two pages of black and white photos. I don't remember why I took over. Professor Choron is a very important man; he's the director of Éditions du Square, which includes Hara-Kiri, Charlie-Mensuel, Charlie-Hebdo, and Mords-y l'oeil. He obviously has other things on his mind than what I have him saying in the photo-novels, which is why he seems so absent-minded: quite simply, he's thinking about something else. The stated goal of these photographic stories is to show off pretty women's behinds. Everything else is just fiction. (text in the book, written by Wolinski)

Hara Kiri, the legendary magazine of the 1960s and 70s, established a guiding principle it never deviated from: to laugh at everything. Among the iconic features that appeared very early on, the photo-novel quickly became a huge success, eventually becoming an essential part of the magazine. Parodying magazines like Nous Deux and Confidences, which were full of saccharine photo-novels, Cavanna and Choron's team adopted the formula, reworking it with the slapstick humor that was the magazine's trademark. Georges Bernier, alias Professor Choron, wrote a column in this format entitled "Professor Choron Has an Answer for Everything." Wolinski wrote over 500 pages of these stories, giving free rein to his wit to relentlessly highlight the disconnect between the spirit of Hara Kiri and its socio-cultural environment: "The society of the sixties made us uncomfortable. [...] We were suffocating under the weight of taboos." And it was the newspaper's own staff who played the actors: Gébé, Reiser, Wolinski, one-night collaborators, the girls next door… Later, in the 1970s, Hara Kiri, by then a veritable institution, saw all the stars of the era, friends and supporters of the newspaper, parade through its offices: Serge Gainsbourg, Renaud, Thierry Le Luron, Eddy Mitchell, Pierre Perret, Alain Souchon, Carlos… Each in turn became the protagonist of these photo-novels, ever more iconoclastic, sexy, and provocative. Rediscover in this book the best of these pages celebrating irreverence and provocation!