“When Jean-Marie began photographing his subjects, he was barely older than they were himself — just twenty-three years old. Only a few months earlier, he had never even heard of Johnny Hallyday. He was in Algeria at the time, because of the war and his military service. The first time he heard Johnny sing was on Christmas Eve on Radio Oran, and the chorus of Retiens la nuit echoed in a strangely poignant way through a city where bombs were exploding on every street corner.

Perhaps it was that Christmas when the Sixties truly began.

Through a chance encounter with Daniel Filipacchi — whom a few of us still call ‘Uncle Dan’ — a very young man was entrusted with photographing other young people for a magazine that had only just been launched.

Looking at these photographs fifty years later, I do not see the past but the present: that carefree spirit which makes you forget yesterday and tomorrow and simply live in ‘the virgin, vibrant and beautiful today’. It is the privilege of youth, for whom time does not exist. Nor does space. Where exactly are Johnny, Chris, Dick or Eddy? They inhabit their dreams of an imagined America — perhaps even more real than the real one — because dreams are contagious, and eventually we impose them on others, especially when they carry the power of childhood and adolescent fantasies.

There were those magical moments of our fifteenth year, when the slopes of Montmartre and Belleville seemed to open onto the plateaus and valleys of Arizona and Colorado. All it took was a visit to a neighbourhood cinema — the Florida or the Marcadet Palace — to watch The Prairie Girl or The Adventurer of the Rio Grande.

There were also those afternoons and evenings of the same era when we first heard Elvis Presley on the jukeboxes near Porte de Clignancourt. Suddenly, the slightly less grey skies of Saint-Ouen became the deep blue skies of Texas.

With the click of a shutter, through sheer instinct, Jean-Marie Périer captured that dream forever.

He had the eye.”