French artist and photographer Pierre Commoy was BOTD in 1950. Born in La Roche-sur-Yon in the Loire Valley, Commoy studied photography in Geneva. After his military service, he moved to Paris in 1976, working as a photographer for Rock & Folk, Dépèche Mode and Interview magazines. Later that year, he met painter Gilles Blanchard at a gallery installation in Paris, taking a motorcycle back to Blanchard’s apartment and moving in together. Styling themselves Pierre & Gilles, they quickly rose to fame with kitsch portraits of Mick Jagger, Iggy Pop and Andy Warhol, based on Commoy’s photographs and painted over by Blanchard to create kitschy hyper-realist images, drawing variously from Renaissance paintings of Catholic saints, Bollywood cinema, James Bidgood‘s erotic film Pink Narcissus and gay S&M culture. Originally published in Façade magazine, their work led to collaborations with fashion designer Thierry Mugler and singer Amanda Lear. In 1991, they were commissioned by Le Figaro newspaper to create the image of a modern-day Adam and Eve. Their resulting photo was considered too risqué for publication, though appeared two years later on the cover of Actuel magazine, cementing their reputation. They went on to become the most distinctive and openly queer pop culture artists of the late 20th century, creating portraits of actors Catherine Deneuve, Jean Marais, Isabelle Huppert and Tilda Swinton; Mugler and fellow fashion designers Yves Saint Laurent, Jean-Paul Gaultier, Karl Lagerfeld and Marc Jacobs; singers Serge Gainsbourg, Marc Almond, Boy George, Madonna, Marilyn Manson, Kylie Minogue and Conchita Wurst; and porn stars Lola Ferrari, Jeff Stryker and Aiden Shaw. In 2003, their 1991 portrait of singer Lio, entitled The Madonna with the Wounded Heart, was sold for US$196,500, at the time a record sum for a photograph by living artists. Now considered artistic royalty, their work has been endlessly imitated by younger artists, and the subject of retrospectives in Paris, London, Berlin, Tokyo and New York. They continue to live and work together in Paris.