In 1979, a pair of body-less, elegant female legs was seen travelling from London to Brighton on board of a cadillac, stopping, occasionally, at several iconic locations: from Battersea Power Station to delightfully decorated Brighton seafront, from rough taxi ranks to soft English rose gardens. Through a surrealist operation, those lifeless plastic legs became animated stars of vivid imaginary stories, told through the most uninspiring of all the media – an advertising campaign – shot by Guy Bourdin for Charles Jourdan. Throughout his career, spent within the fashion system, Bourdin tried to subvert its very core by producing images that overlooked fashion’s subject matter in favour of subliminal, marginal and often violently unexpected narratives that loomed at its margins. Known for his work for Vogue Paris, Guy Bourdin (1928 – 1991) is mostly associated with colourful “rich and strange” photographs which explored the realms between the “absurd and the sublime”.
And yet, much of Bourdin’s work still remains unknown, as nearly half of his oeuvre – shot in black and white – got completely neglected in favour of his powerful colourful imagery. “Guy Bourdin: Image Maker”, a new retrospective at the Somerset House in London, aims at revealing those largely hidden aspects of Bourdin’s work. Curated by Alistar O’Neill and Shelly Verthime, the exhibition “charts Bourdin’s distinguished 40-year career from Man Ray’s protégé to photography revolutionary in his own right and explores his pursuit of perfection”. In an attempt to reconstruct the secretive photographer’s work and approach – the story of Bourdin determined not to leave a trace of his work has become a widely favoured anecdote – the exhibition includes different body of work – from colour prints to early and late works in black and white, from Polaroid tests to double spread layouts, paintings, working drawings, sketches, notebooks and Super-8 films – that openly tell the story of an image-maker whose photographic craftsmanship sought to defy the very image of fashion.
“Guy Bourdin: Image Maker” runs until March 15th 2015 at Somerset House in London.
