Two decades after fashion photography shifted from aristocratic women striking graceful, static poses, but before it became the anarchic free‑for‑all it is today, came Guy Bourdin. One of the most radical, controversial photographers of his day, Bourdin was at his creative height when he took this intriguing, unpublished image in January 1978. → Photograph: Guy Bourdin
Today, you can’t open an edgy fashion magazine without finding a model suspended from a crane or with her torso lopped off at the waist. But in the 1970s, this approach was groundbreaking. Bourdin was one of the first to subvert the very nature of fashion photography – the idea that beauty and clothes are its central components. → Photograph: Guy Bourdin
In his hands, shoots became surreal, twisted narratives brimming with violence, sexuality and desire – and clothes took a back seat. Influenced by Man Ray (his mentor), surrealist painter Magritte and film-maker Luis Buñuel, Bourdin’s aim was squarely to provoke, even in his well-paid commercial work: he was a long-time collaborator of French shoe designer Charles Jourdan. → Photograph: Guy Bourdin
His muse, model Nicolle Meyer (pictured here), recalls that Bourdin insisted on full creative control, that no mere art or fashion editor ever interfere with his work. “He was renowned for submitting a single cropped transparency for publication,” she writes in an introduction to a rare new monograph of his work. → Photograph: Guy Bourdin
“I remember him telling me that one time he had wanted to put a black [model] on the cover of American Vogue, but the idea was rejected.” He cancelled the shoot. → Photograph: Guy Bourdin
Bourdin has, arguably, been more influential on today’s crop of young fashion photographers than anyone before or since. What he realised, ahead of his time, was that it is not fashion, but rather its image, that seduces us.
A Message For You, by Guy Bourdin, is published by Steidl (steidlville.com). Photograph: Guy Bourdin
