Guy Bourdin, Photographer Extraordinaire, 1928-1991 He was the most controversial of the not-really-fashion fashion photographers. "Too sexy, too necro, too sado, too gratuitously violent, too misogynist", they said. Now he's on the verge of a big retrospective, opening Saturday at the Victoria & Albert Museum in London; being exhibited at leading galleries; lauded in the NYT and the object of a website as excellent as the one in my main link. [ These last 3 links go directly to the portfolios.] I just hope - being old enough to remember being severely scolded by my parents for collecting the photographs he published in my generation's vademecum, the since-degraded French magazine Photo - that these far more politically correct times (specially in increasingly intolerant, hygienist and puritanical America) won't prove to be even less welcoming of his work than his own times were.[ *sigh* Probably still NSFW, though most of his work was flipped through by our mothers in Vogue magazine more than 20 years ago...]
posted by MiguelCardoso on Apr 15, 2003 - 3 comments