In 2009, South African photographer Henrik Purienne and German graphic designer Frank Rocholl launched Mirage at Colette in Paris — the legendary concept store that served as a litmus test for cultural relevance in the late 2000s. The magazine they unveiled was 400 pages thick, independently funded, and devoted to a photographic aesthetic and hedonistic culture that drew its inspiration from the 1960s and 1970s: The Velvet Underground, The Doors, Nick Drake, John Lautner's desert architecture, Massimo Vignelli's design, and the unapologetic glamour of Lauren Hutton, Anita Pallenberg, and Betty Catroux.
From Colette, Mirage spread quickly to Magma in London, to boutique hotels and art fairs, and then globally through networks spanning the United States, Canada, Australia, and Great Britain. First editions now sell for up to $500 on the secondary market. The magazine was nominated for the German Design Award in 2011 and won a Print Star in Gold in 2013 for printing quality — a recognition that the physical object was as carefully crafted as the imagery inside it.
Each issue reads like a visual novel of bohemian futurism — sun-drenched photography by contributors including Jason Lee Parry, Matteo Montanari, Ana Kras, Quentin de Briey, and Purienne himself, interwoven with features on forgotten utopias, vintage Porsches on desert roads, and the kind of cinematic staging that makes the reader feel they have stumbled into a lost film from 1973. The editorial content has a documentary quality, often exploring the intimate relationship between photographer and muse, with recurring themes of summer, youth, freedom, and natural beauty — the freckles, the tan lines, the unfiltered light.
In 2016, Purienne and Rocholl published Jamais Vu, a hardcover anthology bound in peach linen with rose-gold lettering, collecting the best work from the first four issues and marking what Purienne called the end of act one. The magazine has since continued with new editions including La Isla and Univers Parallèle, each one a portal into an alternate world where the essential and the timeless take precedence over the disposable and the new. It's Nice That called it an "archive of hedonism" — and that is exactly what it is: a 400-page argument that beauty, freedom, and the open road are the only things worth publishing about.
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