In 2003 Michel Haddi’s agent got him an assignment any photographer would have salivated over: go to exotic Tahiti to photograph French actress and former Miss France Linda Hardy, who the agent also represented. “As soon as I landed in Tahiti, I realized that I had never felt closer to paradise at any point in my life. The place was absolutely amazing. For two weeks, we photographed Linda and everything around her,” Michel recalled in a recent interview in Euro News.
Michel has been all over the world and has spent decades at the top of the fashion photography pyramid. He’s worked for everybody (“everybody”, to be clear, refers to all the top magazines in the world that you’ve heard about, not literally everybody). And he’s familiar around these parts too…
But Tahiti gripped his soul. After a fortnight of photographing Linda from one end of the island to the other, and falling in love with the beautiful country and communities and extraordinary people, someone suggested he should check out the surfing world championships that were about to happen off of a coastal part of the island called Teahupo’o. Teahupo has a unique coral reef formation that helps produce some of the highest, most awe inspiring and dangerous waves in the world. For surfers this place is one of the aquatic Meccas on the planet.
Intrigued, Michel went to see the shore for himself and rented a small boat and was taken out to sea. He was awestruck by the sheer beauty and sheer magnitude of the waves, and, I imagine, his own tininess in contrast to the dramatic ocean and the rising waves. He says he lay down in the boat, taking photos of the massive waves rolling towards him with a simple point and shoot camera, not his best equipment, overwhelmed. And ecstatic.
He met and photographed Kelly Slater, then the world’s greatest surfer. He didn’t really know anything about Slater, except that he was a champion and, perhaps more important, very photogenic. He and Slater got on famously, and the photos of him, including one where Michel says he looks like a dolphin, are timestamps of the era.
Twenty years later Michel discovered that for the 2024 Paris Olympics, the surfing competition would be held in Tahiti, which is part of French Polynesia, so still France. He decided to find all the photos he took on his trip there and put them together for a gorgeous, 420 page book called Tahiti Surf. The book is a (very) limited edition coffee table art book — only 1000 were produced, with variations from the straightforward signed book with gilt edge, for the pocket change of 170 British pounds, of which there were 650, to the single, one only, collector’s edition, signed in a painted plexiglass box with an accompanying large print. That’ll reduce your wealth by a cool 10,000 pounds sterling. But, it has to be said, the shipping is free! And it’s still available.
It’s designed exquisitely by Roberto Da Pozzo
With Michel, all of his work is about love. Honestly, that’s priceless.