By VICTORIA CAMBLIN

Jean Pigozzi was introduced to me simply as “Johnny” when I met him in Moscow in September. Drinking Perrier and wearing a zip-up hoodie of his own design – it was covered with various international currency signs – he handed me a white business card with a blue gremlin on it. Flipping it over I saw a Geneva address and the name Jean Pigozzi and thought, “Oh – that Johnny.”

The gremlin is Limo, the mascot for Limoland, Pigozzi’s own brand of luxury streetwear. In addition to the embroidered hoodie he was modeling when we met, the line includes high-quality cashmere sweaters and travel gear such as multicolored K-way jackets and Yoshida laptop and iPod cases, all emblazoned with Limo’s grimacing likeness. Limoland’s ethos is thoroughly Johnny: it is the uniform of a successful venture capitalist with a refreshing sense of humor and maverick creativity that must be hopelessly rare among high-tech investors. The Harvard-educated Italian businessman, African art collector (the biggest in the world), sportswear designer, photographer, and man-about-town spoke to me from London about photography, celebrity, and night life on the occasion of the exhibition, “Pigozzi and the Paparazzi” at the Helmut Newton Foundation, Berlin. We can expect a new book of his photographs to hit bookstores sometime next year.

VICTORIA CAMBLIN: Your works are exhibited with Helmut Newton’s. Why do you imagine they named the show in Berlin after you?
JEAN PIGOZZI: I guess it sounded good.

There must have been some other reason.
I guess because I’m not a paparazzi. Paparazzi use long lenses, they hide behind trees, hide behind bushes, and they wait for people for hours. I’ve never done that – in all the pictures I’ve taken, I’m not that far away from the people and usually I know them. I don’t wait for ten hours for Madonna to come out with her baby in a pram. I’m not hiding, so I’m not a paparazzi.

So how do you identify as a photographer?
I just take pictures of what happens in my life. I’m an amateur photographer.

So it’s like a photo journal.
Being dyslexic, I don’t write anything. So yes, this has been my sort of journal for the past 30 years.

You’re taking pictures of these extremely famous people who you’re out and about with. Do you consider yourself famous?
Pff, yeah, vaguely, but I mean compared to Mick Jagger, Madonna, and Andy Warhol, I’m zero famous. Compared to the milkman, I’m famous. So I guess I’m semi-famous. People in the street of course have no idea who I am.

Do you desire to be famous?
If I had desired to be famous, I would have become a guitarist.

Do you ever get star-struck? I can’t really imagine you being in awe of these people, but …
When I was a kid, definitely. I was so excited to meet Michael Douglas or whatever. Now I’m happy to meet them but I make no real effort to … I’m more interested in meeting Warren Buffet or Bill Gates or a painter or something like that than meeting, you know, the singer of some teenage rock band or some famous model – I’m just not that fascinated by it. I mean I like them, some of them are my friends and all that, but I won’t displace myself to meet somebody like that. You know a lot of people ask for stars’ photographs, but I’m much more amused by taking my own picture with them. I think it’s a much more personal thing to have Johnny in the photograph.

But were you actually meeting people like Michael Douglas a lot when you were growing up?
No, not really, I started meeting people when I had my first job in Hollywood in the mid-’70s. My family were industrialists – I was meeting industrialists, not show business types of people.

And did you know Helmut Newton?
Yes, I was very good friends with Helmut Newton. Absolutely.

Are you still doing this? When we met in Moscow I don’t remember you having had your camera.
Every day, I take pictures every day.

You mentioned last time we spoke that you weren’t terribly fond of Berlin.
I went twice this year, once for the Biennale and once for my opening, and I mean it was wonderful, there were lovely people there, but I just didn’t get it – I didn’t find the place electrifying. I didn’t get the vibe that everybody’s talking about Berlin. Then again I don’t really go out at night – I don’t go to the nightclubs or the sex clubs. Maybe they’re incredible but I don’t go.

But you are going to parties.
Yeah I go to parties, I just don’t go to nightclubs. I hate cigarettes and I don’t drink so maybe I’m missing a lot because of that. If I go to bed at four in the morning, the day after I’m a zombie, so I don’t do it. I’ll go for twenty minutes and then I’ll leave. You know, I’m old though. I started going to clubs when I was twelve years old, so I’ve served my time.

The style of photo you take that’s really close range and sometimes has you in it – like you and Mick Jagger and Jerry Hall, kind of reminds me of this guy who kind of gave hipster party pictures a second wind a couple years ago on the web, “The Cobrasnake.” People got famous from the pictures he took at concerts and so on. Have you seen this?
No. I started doing this in 1970 – I can’t say that I invented the style, but I’ve really been doing it for more than thirty years. I do many many other photographs though – those aren’t the only photographs that I do. It’s fun to do them, but I take pictures of icebergs and I take pictures of dogs and I take pictures of food – I take pictures of many other things. But those are kind of fun to take, you know?

Are you much of a gossip at all? It must be kind of hard to negotiate this whole celebrity media thing when you’re such an insider.
A gossip? No. I’m the opposite of a gossip. I have a lot of pictures of celebrities that I have never shown to anybody – I guess I’m trusted by these celebrities, because they know that there are a lot of pictures I’m going to take that are going to disappear.

A gossip would put these pictures everywhere; I’m like a tomb. The pictures that I show of these celebrities are, well, sweet – there’s nothing incriminating, there are no pictures of people doing drugs, no pictures of weird sexual things … not that I have them, but I would never show them. It’s the paparazzi who will try to find a picture of Madonna with her pants down or breasts showing or whatever. But many of these people are my friends and I would never want to embarrass them.

But wait, is it that you have these photos and make them disappear, or is it that you don’t take them in the first place?
Oh, I just don’t take them.

I’ll take your word for it.