Bourdin

Guy Bourdin (1928-1991) was a french photographer. His initial passion centered on sketching and painting, and it was as a painter that he made his début, in 1960, in Vogue France. But at that magazine — for which he worked for twenty years — he arrived above all as a photographer when, struck by the aesthetic beauty of the famous picture of a pepper taken by Edward Weston, who captured its sensuality, he decided to interest himself in the field. He rapidly made a name for himself during the 1960s thanks to the personality with which he put together daring advertising campaigns such as the one in 1966 for Charles Jourdan shoes, or the sensual catalogues of underwear for Bloomingdale’s in New York. Openly influenced by Surrealism, but also capable of fusing the visions of Man Ray with the vivid chromatism of Pop Art (as proved by the enormous objects, such as hearts and shoes, with which he measured his models), he was an artist almost obsessed with formal perfection. In his study in the Paris neighborhood of Le Marais, the completely black walls, the locked windows, and the absence of a phone showed his willingness to isolate himself from the outside world until his work was finished. Just as careful in the page make-up of his photos, he always refused to use them for exhibits or books, outside the purely commercial purpose for which they had been conceived. It is from this same point of view that one must consider his 1987 rejection of the Grand Prix National de la Photographie, which said was “utterly useless.” In the last years of his life, in order to avoid depression, he went back to painting, although without abandoning photography. In 2002, the Shine gallery in London dedicated a large retrospective to him, while Bulfinch Publishers issued his only monograph, Exhibit A: Guy Bourdin, which offers a complete Collection of his work from the 1950s to 1991.