Guy Bourdin

Guy Bourdin created the most challenging and seductive fashion photography of the last century. This book, with its breathtaking sequences of images, and in-depth essays, is the first thorough investigation of Guy Bourdin’s compelling visions.

The impact of the imagery of Guy Bourdin on both commercial and fine art photography continues to resonate today. Bourdin made radical changes both in the style and the meaning of commercial imagery. His fashion shoots are mysterious, hypnotic, surreal, exposing the true and unnerving nature of desire. He shows that, within the context of fashion it is rarely the product that compels us. It is the image – the carefully staged narrative of sexual fantasy, the quest for the unattainable, the suggestion of danger – that stimulates consumer desire.

Guy Bourdin was born in 1928 and spent much of his youth living in post-war Paris. An assiduous observer of culture, he showed precocious artistic talent and fierce ambition. From seeking out Man Ray to taking his portfolio of photographic nudes to French Vogue in 1954, Bourdin showed his determination to not only create but to have an audience. He would go on to work for French Vogue, supplying their most confrontational editorial images for over thirty years. His ingenuous advertisements for Charles Jourdan shoes and Bloomingdale’s in the mid 1970s were the high points of his career and landmarks in the field of advertising.

The images chosen for this book include not only his ground-breaking fashion shoots, but also his brooding black-and-white landscapes from the 1950s and the magical colour cityscapes of two decades later. Each is a part of a carefully orchestrated sequence which offers an unprecedented insight into the full range of Guy Bourdin’s work.

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The essays:

Sighs & Whispers -- Rosetta Brooks
Rosetta Brooks was the first writer to fully examine the power and meaning of Guy Bourdin’s fashion photography in her essay of 1981 Sighs and Whispers. Brooks has reflected on, and updated her essay, which analyses Bourdin’s 1976 lingerie catalogue for the Bloomingdale’s department store, for this book.

Guy Bourdin: The Formative Years -- Philippe Garner
Bourdin had a precocious talent and a focussed ambition. This essay from photo historian Philippe Garner draws together the range of the social and cultural influences and motivations that shaped his work. It places the young Bourdin in the post-war climate of Paris and defines the ideas and formal devices that Bourdin would explore throughout his life.

The Falsity of an image -- Charlotte Cotton
This essay, by the curator of the exhibition, looks at an advertisement for Charles Jourdan published in fashion magazines in 1975. By concentrating on one image, Charlotte Cotton reveals the layers of reference and of meaning that Bourdin would activate in the context of fashion imagery and how this changed commercial imagery forever.

Searching for the infinite -- Laurence Benaim
Writer, Laurence Benaim looks at the significance that written text played in Bourdin’s creativity, bringing together a collage of his private universe. A sense of the literature that inspired him, Bourdin’s own poetic writings and the use of text within his photographs from Baudelaire to Japanese Haiku.

Instantaneous Poetry: The Polaroids of Guy Bourdin -- Shelly Verthime
The external adviser for Guy Bourdin, Shelly Verthime’s piece is a personal exploration of an, until now, unseen aspect of Guy Bourdin’s photography. Bourdin used a polaroid camera to create ambiguous but compelling observations of the world. Verthime analyses the possible meanings of these abstracted landscapes and cityscapes to show us the most dominant formal devices that Bourdin used throughout his life.

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Designed by leading art director, Stephen Wolstenholme, quarter-bound in cloth with a stunning paper laminated cover, and containing previously unpublished images and others not seen for over twenty-five years, as well as a comprehensive bibliography and chronology compiled by Pjerpol Rubens, this book is set to become the defining work on Guy Bourdin.

About the Editors

Shelly Verthime is a cultural historian and also a creative within the world of contemporary fashion in Paris. She conceived, and is external adviser to, this first major exhibition of Guy Bourdin’s work.

Charlotte Cotton is the Curator of the Guy Bourdin exhibition and has curated many successful exhibitions in the V&A’s acclaimed Canon Photography Gallery. She is the author of Imperfect Beauty, The Making of Contemporary Fashion Photographs (V&A Publications, 2000)