Cannes Gone Wild: Derek Ridgers’s Raw Photos Show the Film Festival at Its Most Unruly

When the photographer Derek Ridgers was once operating on his ebook, Cannes—a selection of raucous, glamorous, and half-naked hijinks he snapped on the mythical movie pageant between 1984 and 1996—he first toyed with naming the tome Nuts in May. He felt it was once an apt name, one who captured the debauchery and bacchanalia of the instant. “It’s a bit crazy,” he recalled of the development within the ’80s and ’90s, when social media didn’t but exist and images simplest got here in analog shape. “It took me a while to understand exactly what was going on: it’s a festival of exhibitionism as much as a festival of film,” Ridgers instructed W from his house in London. “I personally, as a photographer, live for people who want to show off. Without them, the photographs would be very boring.”

No one may just accuse the 100-or-so photographs in Cannes, revealed by way of IDEA, of being monotonous. Since the pageant’s inception in 1946, the pink carpet and Croisette have performed host to one of the most largest stars in historical past, together with Diana Ross, Grace Kelly, and Princess Diana, amongst hundreds of others. But on the time that Ridgers was once on task for publications like The Face, Time Out, and NME, the actual peacocks had been the parents at the seashore and the street, hoping to get their photograph snapped. “Very often, I would get half an hour for my photo shoot assignments,” he stated. “Then the rest of the time is basically free—you can kick about in the hotel or go out with your camera and have adventures, which is what I used to do.”

Ridgers would arrive on le Boulevard de los angeles Croisette round 9 A.M., and wouldn’t go away till middle of the night maximum evenings. There, he stuck a tender Frankie Rayder in a pink get dressed, and John Waters, on the town for the premiere of his movie Cry-Baby, being interviewed at the seashore. In 1995, Elizabeth Berkley, then very best identified for Saved by way of the Bell was once thronged by way of press for her starring position within the risqué cult vintage, Showgirls, directed by way of the Dutch filmmaker Paul Verhoeven. “I was fascinated by it, and slightly drawn in,” Ridgers admits of the scene.

Of route, there’s a wholesome quantity of nudity within the ebook—this was once France within the 1980s, finally. Whether topics had been sunbathing topless or working bare via a fountain for photogs, there’s masses to peer inside the pages of Cannes. “Some of the male photographers in the photographs, they’re showing themselves, really,” Ridgers says of the leering shooters. “I don’t necessarily put myself above those people—I was one of them. But we are not showing ourselves in our best light, I don’t think.”

In the context of 2025, Ridgers has some degree—images like the type featured in his ebook, to be had May 15, isn’t as glamorous because the Cannes pink carpet photographs that flood our feeds lately. But a sense of pleasure and titillation permeates throughout the photographs the entire identical.

“It was very thrilling,” he stated of the movie pageant again then. “It was quite an enjoyable battle to try and do it in the first place. It was all part of the fun.”