With their startling fairytale imagery, the fashion photographer Guy Bourdin's pictures have lost none of their uncomfortable allure. Drusilla Beyfus takes a look, as a new book and exhibition celebrate his work.Though he died 19 years ago, the French photographer Guy Bourdin, one of the unquestioned innovators in his field of fashion photography, suddenly finds himself part of a hot topic. He was sworn to the printed magazine page. It was his chosen medium of expression throughout his four-decade career. But, goes the argument, with advances in technology and viewers increasingly turning to websites and apps, is there a future for magazine photography?
The case for the defence occurs in a new monograph of Bourdin's work, In Between, curated and edited by London-based Shelly Verthime. In her words, 'He mastered the transient fashion magazine as a stage and a story board.' The material in In Between focuses primarily on work produced between 1955 and 1985 for Bourdin's longest-lasting patrons, Condé Nast's French Vogue and Charles Jourdan, the French shoemaker.
'What you see in Bourdin,' Philippe Garner, a Sotheby's director, has said, 'is a linking of two great themes: desire and death.' Bourdin's first photographs for French Vogue in 1955, some of the most daring fashion images of the 20th century, according to Verthime, featured a model in an exquisitely designed hat photographed among the animal carcases at Les Halles, the Paris meat market.
In one shot a row of eviscerated animals hangs behind the model, who gazes impassively at the camera. His advertising shots for Charles Jourdan alluded to dark fairy tales and horror stories (such as the 1967 photograph depicting three slender legs dressed in brightly coloured hosiery and satin slippers, all roped together and stretched out across a railway line).
Bourdin had a hard attitude to women - in life as well as in his photographs, it seems. His biographers attribute this to his abandonment by his mother in infancy. His wife, Solange Greze, died in inconclusive circumstances in 1969; his lover Sybille Danner committed suicide in 1981. In the studio he was renowned for making extreme demands of his models.
Anthony Haden-Guest, writing in the New Yorker, recounted a French Vogue shoot in which Bourdin had the faces of two models covered in a layer of glue, over which he scattered black pearls. Bourdin decided to go further and wanted to do their entire bodies with pearls. Probably because of overheating, the two models passed out.
Painting was and remained Bourdin's first love, but having received training as a photographer during his military service with the French Air Force, he took to the camera with determination. After introducing himself to Man Ray in Paris he became a protege of the artist and a child of the Surrealist movement. Magritte's familiar image of a bowler-hatted man was subsequently invoked in a shoe advertisement.
In the mid-1950s, having shown his photographs to the editor-in-chief of French Vogue, Edmonde Charles-Roux (Bourdain had no commercial pictures in his portfolio), he was commissioned to try his hand at fashion. It was the beginning of a 30-year relationship with the magazine in which he was accorded almost complete creative freedom. He pushed the boundaries of fashion photography both aesthetically and in terms of their erotic content. In the 1960s his then Vogue editor Francine Crescent brought him together with the business of Charles Jourdan, a connection that lasted for 15 years and which produced arguably his most imaginative images.
The political correctness of the 1980s saw Bourdin fall out of favour; towards the end of his life he was said to have become a recluse. But in the past decade people have looked at his pictures in a new light.
Although not as well known in Britain as his contemporary Helmut Newton - with whom he is frequently (if wrongly) compared - Bourdin is now a major influence. David Lynch, the film director, has acknowledged his input, the photo-grapher Nick Knight has attributed his own 'neo-glam look' to Bourdin, while Glen Luchford, the creator of campaigns for Prada and Calvin Klein, has admitted a creative debt to him. Madonna has described Bourdin's erotic 1970s images as being 'sick and interesting'.
Although many of the sexual taboos that he played with have lost their punch, his work is appreciated now much more as a branch of the decorative arts. During his lifetime he cold-shouldered highly prestigious professional awards and refused to allow his work to appear in exhibitions, book compilations or to sell single prints. What he cared about was producing magazine photography of a quality likely to ensure a future for the form.
