Guy Bourdin at Somerset House
For Walter Benjamin, fashion was a fusion of two extremes – frivolity and death. Never has this fusion been so extreme as in the photography of Guy Bourdin, and it is the subject of an exhibition at Somerset House opening on the 27th of November.
Bourdin’s trade was as a fashion photographer, not that he ever believed it. He was a surrealist artist to the last and whatever product he was being paid to advertise always played second fiddle to his extraordinary vision. His working process involved the construction of elaborate fictions from which he would pluck a single moment from the narrative, and this would be the image he would enigmatically present to the world. On occasion, much to the world’s bewilderment.
Narcissism forms a strong and heady presence in Bourdin’s photography. The gaze is instrumental and it is his and his alone, which only renders his raw depictions of violence and exaggerated forms of sexual objectification of women and children more remote, more troubling and more problematic.
Bourdin’s subjects are hyper-sexualised and submissive. Frequently, his models are depicted as the victims of extreme violence. They lie amid elegantly assembled surroundings unconscious or dead – a signature Bourdin image and the one he felt was the ‘purest’. His almost exclusively female subjects rarely have agency. Often they don’t even have heads. A woman lies prostrate in a pool of vomited nail varnish, another lies inert surrounded by expensive shoes, others are decapitated, but always beautifully dressed. It would be easy to read his work as a savage statement on the destructive collusion of women and their vanity. An odd statement from a Vogue photographer, but Bourdin was the type of man liable to commute to his Parisian office by camel, a key indicator of a man who didn’t put much stock by the rules.
Serge Lutens once commented that he felt that; “What Guy did was conduct his own psychoanalysis in Vogue.” This isn’t an uncommon view and there has been a great deal of head scratching over his early abandonment by his mother and the unfortunate fact that all his wives and girlfriends ended up either dead or wishing that they were. Surely, this is a line of argument that will provide much mental masturbation for decades to come but it doesn’t do a great deal to answer a more pressing question – what has the effect of Bourdin been on the fashion photography of today?
The crass sexual objectification in Terry Richardson’s output with the odd, juvenile surrealist touch as though to add a gloss of artistic merit to his personal sexual entitlement bears the shadow of Bourdin, although Richardson’s work at its best is only a pale parody of the painfully uncomfortable and intricately contrived photographs of Bourdin. On the other hand, there is painstakingly created and beautiful work of contemporary artists such as Tim Walker who surely owe a nod to Bourdin’s meticulous narrative working process.
A complicated and problematic legacy for a complicated and problematic artist.
For information on the exhibition visit www.somersethouse.org.uk/visual-arts/guy-bourdin
Clare Bowden
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- Guy Bourdin at Somerset House - November 27, 2014