Guy Bourdin is one of those fine arts, fashion & fine arts nude photographer who has been a great inspiration to a lot of photographers who followed, with his bold, colorful style & a composition that appears quite surreal in many of his images.
In fact, in 2020 an exhibition called the “Postwar Parisian Avant-Garde” (Pariser Avantgard der Nachkriegszeit) of Guy Bourdin’s collection of street photography & human portraits were done in Kunsthalle “Talstrasse” in Halle, Germany.
These images represented the first years of Bourdin’s photography between 1949 & 1955, when he returned to civilian life after military service in the air force. He began photographing in early 1953 under the pen name Edwin Hallan & Ii 1955 Guy Bourdin did his first commission for Vogue. He was with Vogue Paris till 1987.
With the eye of a painter, Guy Bourdin created images that contained fascinating stories, compositions, both in B&W and in colours. He was among the 1st to create images with narratives, telling stories and shows that the image is more important than the product which is displayed – Guy Bourdin Estate
Although most of my fine arts nude photography projects are done predominantly in black & white or very muted colors because of their themes, I have picked up the directness of Guy Bourdon’s approach in most of them.
Guy Bourdin’s compositions seem to be from daily life with an unexpected twist, almost surreal in many cases & definitely a sudden departure from the mundane life of most. His photography & style was greatly influenced by Man Ray & Edward Weston among others.
“He developed a technique using hyper real colours, meticulous compositions of cropped elements such as low skies with high grounds and the interplay of light and shadows as well as the unique make-up of the models.”
Guy Bourdin was not personally in favor of self promotions & rarely wanted his work to be either displayed or published, and it is said that he wanted all his photographs be destroyed after his death! His polaroids & many of the off-hand sort of pictures were later preserved & presented in numerous publications, many by Vogue France.