FRANÇAIS
ENGLISHGuy Bourdin
Although he has not found public success, the discrete and almost secretive photographer Guy Bourdin (1928-1991) paradoxically stands for a mythical French artist, whose very personal world comes in a variety of often radical pictures he took for more than thirty years. His amazingly innovative pictures scoff at the genres, examine the status of a picture, thus have been marking for long many contemporary photographers and artists.
Guy Bourdin starts with painting and drawing, before discovering photography when he is 20, during his national service in Senegal, in 1948. From then on, in addition to his paintings and drawings which he exhibits when he gets back in 1950, he devotes himself to shooting. His black and white pictures reveal his desire to explore the potential of the camera.
In 1951, Guy Bourdin meets Man Ray, a painter and photographer he deeply admires. In 1952, thanks to a text written by his "artistic godfather", he exhibits his pictures for the first time at Galerie 29, in Paris.
Between 1954 and 1966, Vogue Paris fashion magazine content and model have a revival, boosted by Edmonde Charles Roux, the young new editor. Indeed, she decides to hire new talented writers and photographers, among whom Henry Clarke and William Klein, to renew the magazine’s reputation. In 1954, Guy Bourdin becomes one of Vogue Paris favourite photographers. The following three decades are inevitably associated with daring pictures which often saturated colours brightly appear on the pages of the magazine.
Guy Bourdin, a major figure of fashion and advertisement photography, mainly works for magazine papers as well as the most famous luxury brands of which he made the advertising campaigns, such as the shoemaker Charles Jourdan in 1967, as well as Gianfranco Ferré, Gianni Versace, Madame Grès, Revillon... Through his pictures, Guy Bourdin offers out of touch worlds, extraordinarily far from the conventional fashion pictures which were published at that time.
A perpetually modern style
Created for printing, Guy Bourdin’s photographs meet the press contingencies, such as the format or the composition. They also meet the publishing and reading conditions requirements. Guy Bourdin is the "maker-up" as well as the brilliant director of his pictures, notably when he creates a composition according to the vertical folding of the magazine's double page. The meticulous compositions offer very dynamical arrangements, winning the reader’s look into short film narrations offered all along the pages into which can be found the products, sometimes edged out.
Here is Guy Bourdin’s talent: making the viewers go into the scene to analyse its content rather than focusing on the product, thus making them perceive the product not through its image, but through the way it’s presented, in the heart of the imagery it conveys, proposing unusual parallels. For instance, on one of the pictures published in the 1980 Pentax calendar, a naked model wearing black stockings partly vanishes under a bed on which is a soft toy.
In one of the advertisements he made in 1968 for Charles Jourdan, he directs a woman dressed in red tights and green shoes who tramples on the hand of a man who is on the ground, trying to catch a gun in front of a crowd. The trick of the direction turns perceptible and the crowd looks at this scene as well as the photographer who shoots it, just like the reader who looks at it in the pages of the magazine. This picture perfectly embodies Guy Bourdin’s fascinating work which examines advertising and its nature, photography and its connection with reality and society, but also its purpose as a reproduced picture and its connection with the reader.
Guy Bourdin’s practical experience goes beyond genres, his work "deals with life". Deeply rooted in reality, he analyses it through a succession of short fictions. His photographs are created like "enigma paintings": female models are scattered in a scenery where they take part in unusual playlets, sometimes enigmatic if not disturbing, which often tend to eroticism. In his pictures, female bodies are manhandled, often reduced to a vague presence and subjected to an eroticized vision. Here, bodies are truncated by the frames, there, they vanish behind some post, below newspapers or behind photographs... The stripped, fetishized bodies languidly expose themselves to Guy Bourdin’s camera.
The power and the tension of the photographs are also enhanced by the use of colours, mainly blood red and its complementary colour, green, which Guy Bourdin widely used in his compositions. Indeed, when brought to their degree of saturation, they emphasize the dramatization of the scenes revealed to the readers’ opinion. Guy Bourdin uses colours, brighter at every page, like a painter. He considers his pigments as essential mediators: they increase feelings, arouse the senses, stress the near surrealist dramatization of some scenes.
According to the title of one of Sigmund Freud’s book, Guy Bourdin’s wonderful photographs throw us into worlds bathed in "disquieting strangeness". They have been deeply manhandling and upsetting us until today.
Eighteen years after his death, in 1991, Guy Bourdin’s work remains extremely modern.
Guy Bourdin starts with painting and drawing, before discovering photography when he is 20, during his national service in Senegal, in 1948. From then on, in addition to his paintings and drawings which he exhibits when he gets back in 1950, he devotes himself to shooting. His black and white pictures reveal his desire to explore the potential of the camera.
In 1951, Guy Bourdin meets Man Ray, a painter and photographer he deeply admires. In 1952, thanks to a text written by his "artistic godfather", he exhibits his pictures for the first time at Galerie 29, in Paris.
Between 1954 and 1966, Vogue Paris fashion magazine content and model have a revival, boosted by Edmonde Charles Roux, the young new editor. Indeed, she decides to hire new talented writers and photographers, among whom Henry Clarke and William Klein, to renew the magazine’s reputation. In 1954, Guy Bourdin becomes one of Vogue Paris favourite photographers. The following three decades are inevitably associated with daring pictures which often saturated colours brightly appear on the pages of the magazine.
Guy Bourdin, a major figure of fashion and advertisement photography, mainly works for magazine papers as well as the most famous luxury brands of which he made the advertising campaigns, such as the shoemaker Charles Jourdan in 1967, as well as Gianfranco Ferré, Gianni Versace, Madame Grès, Revillon... Through his pictures, Guy Bourdin offers out of touch worlds, extraordinarily far from the conventional fashion pictures which were published at that time.
A perpetually modern style
Created for printing, Guy Bourdin’s photographs meet the press contingencies, such as the format or the composition. They also meet the publishing and reading conditions requirements. Guy Bourdin is the "maker-up" as well as the brilliant director of his pictures, notably when he creates a composition according to the vertical folding of the magazine's double page. The meticulous compositions offer very dynamical arrangements, winning the reader’s look into short film narrations offered all along the pages into which can be found the products, sometimes edged out.
Here is Guy Bourdin’s talent: making the viewers go into the scene to analyse its content rather than focusing on the product, thus making them perceive the product not through its image, but through the way it’s presented, in the heart of the imagery it conveys, proposing unusual parallels. For instance, on one of the pictures published in the 1980 Pentax calendar, a naked model wearing black stockings partly vanishes under a bed on which is a soft toy.
In one of the advertisements he made in 1968 for Charles Jourdan, he directs a woman dressed in red tights and green shoes who tramples on the hand of a man who is on the ground, trying to catch a gun in front of a crowd. The trick of the direction turns perceptible and the crowd looks at this scene as well as the photographer who shoots it, just like the reader who looks at it in the pages of the magazine. This picture perfectly embodies Guy Bourdin’s fascinating work which examines advertising and its nature, photography and its connection with reality and society, but also its purpose as a reproduced picture and its connection with the reader.
Guy Bourdin’s practical experience goes beyond genres, his work "deals with life". Deeply rooted in reality, he analyses it through a succession of short fictions. His photographs are created like "enigma paintings": female models are scattered in a scenery where they take part in unusual playlets, sometimes enigmatic if not disturbing, which often tend to eroticism. In his pictures, female bodies are manhandled, often reduced to a vague presence and subjected to an eroticized vision. Here, bodies are truncated by the frames, there, they vanish behind some post, below newspapers or behind photographs... The stripped, fetishized bodies languidly expose themselves to Guy Bourdin’s camera.
The power and the tension of the photographs are also enhanced by the use of colours, mainly blood red and its complementary colour, green, which Guy Bourdin widely used in his compositions. Indeed, when brought to their degree of saturation, they emphasize the dramatization of the scenes revealed to the readers’ opinion. Guy Bourdin uses colours, brighter at every page, like a painter. He considers his pigments as essential mediators: they increase feelings, arouse the senses, stress the near surrealist dramatization of some scenes.
According to the title of one of Sigmund Freud’s book, Guy Bourdin’s wonderful photographs throw us into worlds bathed in "disquieting strangeness". They have been deeply manhandling and upsetting us until today.
Eighteen years after his death, in 1991, Guy Bourdin’s work remains extremely modern.