Guy Bourdin
V&A Contemporary space
17 April- 17 August 2003

The V&A is staging the first retrospective of Guy Bourdin, the influential photographer known for his intense and dramatic fashion photographs. Bourdin's high profile years, in the 1970's saw his images featured on the pages of top fashion magazines. Already in his mid forties by this time, his editorial and advertising photography broke with conventions of fashion imagery in radical ways. His photographs of carefully staged narratives plunge the viewer into a fantasy world of glamour, pleasure, danger and suspense. Bourdin made it clear as no other photographer before him had done, that we are seduced by the fashion image rather than the product the image promotes.

From the mid 1950s, Bourdin experimented and refined his distinct vision. At the same time as he produced his famous fashion images, he compulsively photographed and filmed his observations of the world in which he moved. The V&A exhibition brings together both these published and private aspects of his work for the first time.

The first room of the exhibition shows a selection of Bourdin's editorial and advertising photographs from the peak of his career in the mid-to-late 1970s. Bourdin's rare combination of talents, including his technical brilliance, and his impressive capability to stage precisely a dramatic scene, are revealed. They are filled with unresolved hints and allusions to the powerful narratives that obsessed him. These images will be shown as the contemporary photographic prints by fashion and art's leading printer Pascal Dangin.

Bourdin's cinefilms, made on the sets of fashion shoots, will be shown alongside these images and offer another perspective on what he searched for visually and emotionally in the area of fashion photography.

The second room of the exhibition offers a surprising view of Bourdin's work. Withinh this rooms hundreds of his unpublished private images - polaroids, early black and white photographs, sketches, notes and slides - are assembled together. All images shown here are devoid of human figures and of fashion. Together they reveal Guy Bourdin's visual language and the motifs that recur throughout his work.

Guy Bourdin was born in 1928 and spent much of his youth living in post-war Paris. An assiduous observer of culture, he showed prcocious artistic talent and fierce ambition. His innovative fashion photographs first appeared in French Vogue in 1954 and he continued to work mainly for the magazine for the next 30 years. His editorial fashion stories and advertising amapigns were of such daring and ingenuity that their impact on visual culture was almost instantaneous. His images have continued to be a source of creativity for many renowned contemporary photorgaphers, stylists, art directors and artists. For the opening of the exhibition Nick Knight will create a piece for his website, Showstudio, that is inspired by Bourdin's private cinefilms.

Charlotte Cotton is the curator of Guy Bourdin and is the curator of photographs at the Victoria and Albert museum.

Guy Bourdin was conceived by Shelly Verthime, the External Advisor to this exhibition. Shelly Verthime is a cultural Historian and also a creative consultant within the world of contemporary fashion in Paris.