Guy Bourdin exhibition In London

A new generation of people have discovered the art of Guy Bourdin (1928 – 1991) thanks to Madonna‘s latest video, Hollywood, in which, Bourdin imagery is strongly featured. The mini film directed by Jean Baptiste Mondino captures many classic Bourdin concepts. Guy Bourdin was a French photographer best known for his work for French Vogue from the mid fifties to the mid eighties. His work, which depicts a surreal kind of alienation, is now on show in London at the V & A Museum untill August 17th.

Here’s a summary of the V&A presentation of the Exhibition:

The first retrospective of Guy Bourdin, the influential French photographer known for dramatic fashion photographs.

“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.
The photographs, slides and notebook pages in the second gallery are a record of the images that Guy Bourdin chased throughout his life.”