There are interesting photography exhibitions going on in London this summer. Kimmelman made a detour to London on his way back from Venice to catch The Guy Bourdin exhibition in V&A and ‘Cruel and tender’ show in Tate, (arguably) the first photoography retrospective there. (The article was free when I first bookmarked it, but it is now priced. Unless you have access to the archive anyway, it is probably not worth the price of admission)
From whatever I have seen of Bourdin’s photographs (Link NOT work safe), I have always been curious about him. The current spate of coverages in art magazines following the V&A retrospective, gave me the opportunity to catch up. Pre-Bourdin fashion world was largely pictorial. It would navigate the safe territory of conventional female sexuality to sell products. But in the seventies, Bourdin’s spreads in Vogue alongwith those of Helmut Newton’s blew them away. using loud colors, metaphors drawn from the art world transposed into fetishistic images bordering on soft porn, Bourdin introduced the idea of staged narratives into the fashion world the reverberations of which are still being felt.
As the May/June issue of ‘Tate Arts and Culture’ notes,
Both Gustav Courbet’s ‘Jo, La Belle Irlandaise’ (1866) and Bourdin’s image for Charles Jourdan in the summer of 1977 depict a beautiful redhead gazing at a reflection of herself, her flaming hair set off by a contemporary background….Bourdin adds his own signature touches – the high gloss materials, the provocative gamine pose -transporting the scene to the present day, while the contrasting light and darkness add surprising depth and wonderment.
“There is nothing so poetic in the world as the death of a beautiful woman” – Edgar Allan Poe (said). A model lies (nearly) nude in the semi darkness of a hotel room , her Charles Jourdan-sandalled feet overhanging the end of the plain bed. The door to the room is wide open; a small boy passing in the corridor catches a glimpse of her immobile figure. The model’s head and shoulders are violently cropped out of the image, and ‘replaced’ by those of a mime like figure on a television screen facing us, the viewer……”
The resemblance of this woman to a corpse is not imagined. Her position nearly parallel to the picture plane, her rigid, joined legs, the rumpled white bed linen and the pleated white loincloth are virtually identical to those of LE christ Mort by Philippe de Champaigne (1602-74) in the Louvre. The V&A exhibition reveals that Bourdin created a precise, full size drawing of this scene in preparation for the photograph: notably, the woman’s feet are bare, as are Christ’s.
The suggestion of autobiographical elements in the image – that Bourdin is picturing ‘his and our greatest fear’, the loss of the mother – is plausible. The boy in the picture is not a professional model, but the artist’s son.
Steeped in the works of Poe, Charles Baudelaire, the surrealist artists and those from their pantheons, not to mention Alfred Hitchcock and popular detective stories, Bourdin brought the taste for the macabre to his magazine work. The list of expired heroines he portrayed disguised as fashion models runs from Cleopetra and Snow White to Elizabeth Siddan posing for John Everett Millas as the drowning Ophelia (1851-52, Tate Bretain). Although conceived for supposedly superficial fashion magazines, we can read nearly all of Bourdin’s fashion and beauty work as memento mori, pointing to the vanity of the very glamorous world he represents.
Bourdin had a lousy personal life. His first wife is suspected of having committed suicide. His two girlfriends who followed her certainly did. Bourdin actually wanted to be a painter and used to paint at leisure. He did not think much of his advertising work and consistently refused permission for an exhibition of his photographs or publication in a book form. He was also very demanding. It was also the pre-photoshop, pre-digital era. He used to subject his models to rather horrifying ordeals in order to get the effect that he wanted. One model had pretty serious trouble getting stuff off her face after one her shoots. Another almost drowned while a narrative Bourdin was shooting went awry. Some refused to work with him. Others thrived and came back again and again. He maintained fanatical control over his finished image and is probably the only one from that era who did not let the magazine or the advertiser change anything in the photograph (Short bio here).
During the eighties, prudishness came back into vogue. Bourdin’s work lost favour with the advertisers. Once grunge took over the fashion scene, Bourdin’s name went off the public radar.
It is only now, over the last few years, that Bourdin is coming back into circulation again. Pictured magazine in their June 2003 issue said
What he did ws reference it to the nth degree. “I thought I’d like almost to take the exact idea of the steak on the face, or the girl tied to the tree, or the hosepipe, or the water being thrown or the shiny green backgrounds and the shiny red red backgrounds, and the ring flas and everything …I wanted to bring it all back in one go, throw it all over the fashion scene and see how it looked.”
Re’mi Babinet, creative director of BETC Euro RSCG says “Bourdin was the first person in advertising to say that the image of a product is not just a picture, or a pack shot; it’s a whole universe, a whole world.
That concept is now so central to advertising and the milieu of fashion that it’s almost impossible to imagine a time before branding really got its claws into the hearts and minds of consumers. But it wasn’t just this that set him apart, it has his dedication to the idea that he could sell without ever having to sell out.
Charlotte Cotton (curator of the exhibition) singles out Steven Meisel as Bourdin’s most accomplished successor. “He’s the best. A huge proportion of the advertising you see is by Steven Meisel – Dolce and Gabbana, Prada, Versace, Valantino – and every campaign is so different.” The connections are there to be made; his current campaign for Dolce and Gabbana features model Gisele surrounded by CCTV cameras and monitors, each trained on a different part of her body. The sense of voyeurism, and the play on the act of looking are undeniably ‘Very Bourdin’. His advertisements for Valentino echo Bourdin’s image of a model with alarge photograph held in front to preserve modesty.”
…Perhaps closest of all in terms of artistry are Inez van Lamsweerde and Vinoodh Matadin. “Their production process strikes me as quite similar,” says Cotton “The way that Bourdin worked, he virtually invented a life story for a charecter or a kind of a scene before he took the photograph. Inez and Vinoodh do that as well and the fact that the emphasis is on everything before the shutter has clicked is something which I think puts them in the same league as Bourdin.” They too have worked the homage vibe, not least in a campaign for Patrick Cox shoes that recalls the tone of the Bourdin/Jordan advertising.”
Art Auction magazine in their last issue went further. It claimed that the cinematic images of Gregory Crewdson and Philip diCorcia or the staged narrative of Cindy Sherman follow directly in the tradition of Bourdin and what he accomplished. (I think Crewdson’s current work is more accessible than Bourdin’s, but it has the same edginess.)
Pictured quoted Knight as saying:
Other links:
Excerpt from Exhibit A
Shine Gallery that manages sell of Bourdin prints
Other stories
Iam trying to get in touch with Samuel Bourdin. Does anyone have his email address?
Dear Sheila – yes I am also trying, having gone to college with him – please do let me know if you find his email address.