PAST PHOTOGRAPHY EXHIBITIONS
Guy Bourdin Exhibition
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17 April - 17 August 2003
Contemporary Space
At the heart of Guy Bourdin’s fashion photographs is a confrontation with the very nature of commercial image making. While conventional fashion images make beauty and clothing their central elements, Bourdin’s photographs offer a radical alternative.
Guy Bourdin presented fashion as the luxurious embellishment rather than the subject of his photographs. He magnified to centre stage dark fantasies, of lust, consumption and desire.
The fundamental significance of his photographs lies in Bourdin’s knowledge that it is not fashion but its image that seduces and fascinates us. Guy Bourdin was at the height of his career from the mid 1970s to the early 1980s. The first room of this exhibition concentrates on these years, when Bourdin was working predominantly for French Vogue and Charles Jourdan shoes. As well as photographs, the display includes films that Bourdin made on fashion shoots.
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The photographs, slides and notebook pages in the second gallery are a record of the images that Guy Bourdin chased throughout his life. They offer an insight into the thousands of observations he made and his unrelenting capacity to shape his experiences into a visual form. Although the print qualities, camera formats and locations change over time, the instinctive control that Bourdin exerted over his subject matter is repeatedly played out. Together, they are like his best fashion work – both brilliant and unsettling.
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Publication
A book entitled Guy Bourdin,edited by Charlotte Cotton and Shelly Verthime, accompanies the exhibition. This book is the first thorough investigation of Guy Bourdin’s compelling visions and includes in-depth essays by Laurence Benaïm, Rosetta Brooks, Charlotte Cotton, Philippe Garner and Shelly Verthime. It contains a breathtaking sequence of images including previously unpublished photographs and others not seen for over twenty-five years.
Price £35.00 (HB)
ISBN 1 85177 399 1
Purchase at the V&A shop, or buy from the V&A shop online.
Compulsive Viewing: the films of Guy Bourdin
Guy Bourdin’s cinefilms are the fascinating product of his observations of the everyday and the internal world of the fashion shoot. SHOWstudio, Nick Knight’s pioneering fashion broadcasting project, has been given the unique opportunity to reinterpret these cinefilms. Ten of Guy Bourdin’s film shorts can be viewed at www.showstudio.com
Made in Paris
The V&A's Guy Bourdin exhibition is linked with a season of French photography and video, Made in Paris: Photo/Video taking place throughout the month of June 2003 in twenty London galleries. It is co-ordinated by the French Embassy-Institut Français du Royaume-Uni.