About

EDITIONS COMTE holds the exclusive rights to all photographic work produced by Michel Comte from 1979–2007. Tracing his career as one of the most sought after fashion photographers of his time, our archive documents the peak of his creative output in the 80s, 90s, and early 00s. 
The archive contains over 550,000 negatives, highlighting the scope and depth of Comte’s work. Housed in a secure and environmentally controlled facility, we ensure the safe stewardship of his oeuvre into the future. 
Spanning celebrity, fashion, BTS, and documentary images, EDITIONS COMTE is the proprietor of his most iconic and memorable prints from the golden era of fashion. Specialising in portraiture and editorial prints, the archive offers a large collection of editions for private sale and public exhibition. 
With a vision to showcase this oeuvre to a wide audience, EDITIONS COMTE has exhibited Comte’s work at many renowned institutions. High profile exhibitions include a major retrospective at the NRW Forum in Düsseldorf (2009), ‘30 Years of Photography’ at the Museum für Gestaltung in Zürich (2009-2010) and a contribution in ‘Deep Beauty’ at the Museo delle Culture di Milano (2025). 
EDITIONS COMTE reserves sole rights for the sale, reproduction, licensing and exhibition of all Michel Comte photographic work up to and including 2007.

For any and all inquiries, feel free to contact us.

Prints

Our edition prints are produced to order by TRICOLOR BILD PRODUKTION, an independent printing company operating in Adliswil (Zürich), Switzerland, since 1990. Their strong focus on analog processes ensures a level of production quality that is rare in the digital age, and each print becomes a unique work of art, produced with craftsmanship and care.

The negatives from the archive are processed in a drum scanner, which achieves the highest possible sensitivity, sharpness, and dynamic range according to technological high-end standards. Black-and-white prints are produced by digitally exposing (Durst Lambda) silver gelatin baryta paper (Ilford) with the scanned image, followed by a long and intensive development process in a state-of-the-art special machine (Hostert). As this is a time-consuming and resource-intensive process, fewer and fewer technicians are willing to carry it out; in fact, TRICOLOR is the only printing company in Switzerland that offers it.

Color prints are produced in a similar manner using Durst Lambda exposure on archival paper (Fujicolor Crystal Archive paper) and development according to the industry-standard RA-4 process. The C-print process, in which colors are produced at the molecular level rather than via pixels, achieves the coveted “continuous tone gradation” that is characteristic of traditional photo prints and is highly preferred for classic portrait photography such as that of Michel Comte.