Review: A Message For You, By Guy Bourdin

Photography

Guy Bourdin's shot for US Vogue from 1978 (Guy Bourdin)

The influential French fashion photographer Guy Bourdin (1928-91) had his first shots published in Vogue Paris in 1955, and continued to work for the magazine until 1987.

By the 1970s, he had earned his complete artistic freedom, and worked outside the conventions of commercial photography – and as far as possible, outside the boundaries of the photographic medium itself. He wanted to tell whole stories with a single image; his work became ever more boldly stylised, and the influence of his mentor, the surrealist Man Ray, became ever more clear. A Message For You, which focuses on his late- Seventies golden period, was first published as a two-volume monograph in 2008, and now by Steidl in a beautiful, revised and updated, single edition.