The photos of Guy Bourdin, one of the greatest fashion photographers of the 20th century, were repeatedly labeled by viewers as bordering on pornographic. The dark "Hitchcockian" poetics of his photos may not really fill us with joy, but his otherwise controversial shots are downright genius.
Guy Bourdin was born in 1928 in Paris, where he also died in 1991. The fashion photographer had an anxious and unpleasant childhood. His mother left him when he was still a boy, and one and only memory of her haunted him for the rest of his life: an elegant dark-haired Parisian woman in selected clothes and a slender figure, who walked out of his life in tall salons without looking back. No wonder they are right dark-haired women in salons, a motif that manifests itself in grotesque and often sexually perverted ways appears in the vast majority of his otherwise colorful photographs.
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Guy Bourdin became a photographer when he started hanging out with the famous Man Ray (supposedly, he did not even want to accept it at first and Bourdin succeeded only in the seventh attempt). His otherwise brilliant work is always accompanied by rumors about him cruel treatment of models. His life was strange: once he was supposed to do a photo shoot for Vogue magazine rode right on a camel. His private life was also not rosy, as he was considered an extremely demanding and hard-working man: one of his wives and as many as two of his partners allegedly committed suicide.
His photos mark for the work of a sadist and a fetishist, some even have them for pornographic. And although it is up to them something "Hitchcockian", these are photographs that broke the conservative boundaries of good taste in the 20th century – and this is surely the thing that makes his art superb.
See some photos of the famous fashion photographer Guy Bourdin in our photo gallery!
