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Atlas Gallery, in association with Raj Prem Fine Art Photography, is delighted to announce the first exclusive UK exhibition of the celebrated Exile photographs of Dominique Tarlé. In the spring and summer of 1971, Tarlé spent the best part of six months living with the Rolling Stones in the sprawling Villa Nellcôte in the South of France where the band had fled to avoid the attention of the tax authorities. During this period, accepted as a friend and member of an ever-changing household of musicians, friends and family, Tarlé was granted unprecedented access to the private life of the band and in the process documented the creation and recording of the seminal Stones album Exile on Main Street. Possibly the most candid and engaging private record of a band living and working together, Tarlé’s photographs have never been matched by any other photographer’s work on any other band.

Tarlé captures several sides of the experience; the incongruity of making a rock 'n' roll record amid a circus of girlfriends, hangers-on, children and dogs; the formlessness of a life where pleasure, work, hanging out and drug-fuelled angst bled seamlessly into each other. Here's Marlon perching in a row of guitars, Keith and country and western legend Gram Parsons strumming into the small hours, Eric Clapton arriving for Mick's wedding, the band roasting in the sun nursing hangovers, and, in utter contrast to Richards's piratical swagger, Jagger in poses of composed narcissism.

Born in Paris in 1948, Tarlé discovered photography and music simultaneously at the age of 15. To associate both was an obvious career choice for the young photographer, aware that the French press paid no attention to the music scene of the time and that there was thus a very real possibility of what he saw being left unrecorded for posterity. He thus started taking pictures of English bands at the Olympia Music Hall in 1964, including the Stones, the Who, Led Zeppelin, John Mayall and Hendrix. After moving to London in 1968 and photographing the The Rock and Roll Circus and the Hyde Park Free Concert he started hanging around at the Rolling Stones office.

With UK Immigration services chasing him, he found himself travelling through Europe with Buddy Guy and Junior Wells who were opening for the Stones. From there he went down to the French Riviera, visited Keith and Anita, who were already installed at the villa, for an afternoon and ended up staying six months. The group's finances were in chaos. Locked in legal dispute with their ex-manager Allan Klein, the Stones, whose income was taxed at 97 per cent, also faced a ruinous bill from the Revenue. Thus they had bailed out into tax exile on the French Riviera.

Here the band, including Jagger and bride-to-be Bianca, Wyman, Watts and Mick Taylor, decamped to the bohemian splendour of the villa near Villefranche-sur-Mer, bizarrely once the Nazi headquarters during the Second World War, now the chosen venue for the recording of their next album which was to become Exile on Main Street.

Tarlé’s work, rich with echoes of the earlier portraits of aristocratic life on the Riviera by Lartigue offer an unprecedented and largely unequalled portrait of a band at work and play and has achieved almost cult status as a record of the times.

Prices starting at £1,800 for 20X24” signed prints

All images © Dominique Tarlé