PARIS - Jean-Daniel Cadinot, a world-famous French gay porn director and photographer, died in Paris April 23 after suffering a heart attack. He was 64.
Born February 10, 1944, in Paris, Cadinot reportedly realized he was gay at the age of 12. It was not until 1972, however, that he began the gay erotic photography for which he would become legendary. He is reported to have remarked at one point in his career on the irony embodied by his choice of professions: Both of his parents were custom tailors who clothed men, while Cadinot undressed them.
During the early 1960s, Cadinot attended the École des Arts et Métiers and the National School of Photography. After that, he began his career at Valois Studios, directing mainstream films for French-speaking audiences.
Cadinot's first venture into the world of gay erotica began with photographs of author Yves Navarre and popular singers Patrick Juvet and Pascal Auriat. The images circulated only among a small group of admirers, but they convinced Cadinot and his supporters that he had a rare gift for the art form. By 1978 he had published 17 erotic photo albums that collectively sold nearly 200,000 copies. During that same year, he established his own production company, French Art, and completed his first 16mm gay film, Tendres Adolescents.
For Cadinot, gay filmmaking was an expression of activism. He once noted that photography was too limiting a medium to allow him to express the range of collective experiences among gay men. All of Cadinot's more than 60 movies were plot-driven, and they usually involved young men in their teens or early 20s. Many of them were autobiographical, he explained, which may account for their intensely personal approach to the subject matter.
Although his work was widely recognized for the ways in which it combined art and porn, Cadinot did not begin receiving awards until 1991. He received the GAYVN Award for Best Director that year for The Traveling Journeyman. In 1997 and 2002, he received Best Director honors from the Venus Awards. He was inducted into the GAYVN Hall of Fame in 2000.
Renowned gay porn director and GAYVN Hall of Famer Gino Colbert said of Cadinot, "He was a real, true gentleman who had class, caring and pride in what he was making. He was from the old school, and his work was always of epic scale. Definitely one of the great filmmakers from a bygone era."
After his death, Cadinot's webmaster published on his blog a final statement reported to have been written by Cadinot to his fans:
"If you're reading these words I will have put down my camera, switched off the lights, drawn the curtains and taken my final bow. May all the efforts and work of a whole life, the quest for the moment of pure truth in the sublime communion of two beings under the spell of the undefinable desire for the other, inspire those who inherit my heart.
"The human being is made such that it only remembers the good and the beautiful, therefore I leave you with a free mind and a head overflowing with a myriad of young men, sometimes strong and vigorous, sometimes fragile and sensitive. All of them gave me these unforgettable moments of their most tender intimacy, moments that only a few really know but which I made into images to allow you to admire them over and over again.
"Never were success or personal fortune my creed. You offered me gratitude, and I thank you for that because I wanted nothing else. Cadinot salutes you. Remember a kindly fellow, an extreme observer given to rages and contradiction but who listened to others and was full of love.
"An erect phallus is a symbol of life; a cross a symbol of death."
Cadinot's autobiography, Premier, is pending publication in the U.S.
