Poster of the Month: July The Football World Cup is over, I enjoyed every minute of it. So, this post will be about football. Football but not only. About Jamaica where I shot these some years ago, about youth, beauty and grace, about photography, instant photography in black and white with a film in the box and no pixels, about warm air and good vibes. Jessica Hilltout a nomadic, Belgian-born photographer, loaded sacks of deflated soccer balls onto the roof of a battered yellow Volkswagen Beetle last year and began a seven-month road trip across Africa to document the continent’s love of the game.

There is a secret link between those two pictures, I'll let you guess the story and its title.

The house of Jean Cocteau and Edouard Dermit, turned into a museum, reopened to the public a couple of weeks ago after several years of restoration. Cocteau's Hermes brief case.

Scultpures by Carlo Brandelli. My friend, Robert Murphy, author and initiator of the Saint Laurent book, has an art Gallery in the 7th arrondissement in Paris ... and a blog RCM Galerie

L I F E. I am posting this as I just got the news that the daughter of a dear friend is flying to the other world. Life, what more is there ?

Yesterday, the postman knocked at my door with a parcel from my american friend The Black Tulip. It contained a set of prewar Schoenhut animals, hand manufactured in Pennsylvania in the 30's. I was struck by their massive almost shamanic appearence, their fierce eyes, the way they filled my hands, limbs moving with an intricate system of hidden strings, calling for immediate attention.

It happened in Milly la Foret, the village where Jean Cocteau had his country house and where he and his adoptive son Edouard Dermit rest today. He would have liked that.

As a gift to a friend and neighbor, I painted the old tool shed in the courtyard which was used to store garden furniture into a byzantine chapel with traditional pigment the way it's been done for centuries. The curtain around the wall symbolically separates the material and spiritual world. It's an often seen motto in orthodox churches like this one in Mount Athos. The mandorle on top of the door is inspired by this italian renaissance representation of the Boboli Gardens at the Palazzo Pitti in Florence. It pictures the property,the building, the land around and a romain fountain found by chance in the middle of the meadow.

Born in the 1920's, famous in the 50's and today slightly deaf, sometimes in a wheel chair, still at work in their studios, they are the veterans of the art world and the subject of my new book with Robert Murphy. Meet Sergio de Castro. Painter, composer, born in Buenos Aires in 1922. A student of Manuel de Falla and of Joaquin Torres before setting in Paris in 1951 where I photographed him last week.

A bit of street photography is a healthy exercise. I didn't stage this. "How does it feel to kiss a poet ?" The poet is Paul Valery. France, bling and collapse ? The sculptures are by Henri Bouchard 1875-1960. Paris wouldn't be Paris without a demonstration.

Dax-Paris

In the news stand in July. AD France. St Tropez.