Jeanloup Sieff: 40 Years of Photography

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Jeanloup Sieff's photography delights in the pleasurable. When in 1954 he put aside ideas of a glamorous life in film or on the French Riviera working as a gigolo, it was for a career in photojournalism, driven by a different kind of pleasure-seeking: 'the physical pleasure of rendering certain shapes, the pleasure of those maddening lights, the pleasure taken in composing and living through spaces and meetings'.

Elle US, 1995."This is from the same series, and it was taken in Normandy... more Adriana Karembeu, fashion Dolce & Gabbana, Normandy, France, Sieff is heralded as one of the great international photographic talents of the last half-century and has left an undeniable imprint on his generation. Prolific in many fields, the variety of his imagery highlights his broad artistry, ranging from fashion, nudes, landscape and portraiture. He sums up his work this way: “There are no reasons for my photographs, nor any rules; all depends on the mood of the moment, on the mood of the model. “ On art … The impulse that led you to make an image is a thing that you cannot share with anyone, even if you explain it. What remains is a surface that will live its own life, that will belong to everybody. I accept that surface.” -Jeanloup Seiff Jeanloup Sieff

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Regarding fashion (and society), the Seventies were indissolubly tied to a synthesis of the sexes, which first occurred through the widespread use of trousers, and the affirmation of seductive femininity. Ironically, that symbol of joyous liberation called the miniskirt made way for new portrayals of the female body in public. A woman’s success was no longer measured by the shortness of a hem, which now came in a wide variety of lengths. In Paris, women discovered the androgyny of the tuxedo. In New York, they flaunted their figures in body-hugging wrap dresses. Helmut Newton and Guy Bourdin played at hyper-sexualizing bodies and creating a photography style that was blatantly sexy, which infuriated the feminists who did not catch the irony of the gesture. Newton’s message was clear: women are objects – the Alpha women of the future. Elle magazine and fashion shoots. 1958: Magnum, the unlikeliest of homes for such a sensualist. 1959: Jardin des Modes and a tight working relationship with the magazine’s art director Jacques Moutin who, according to Sieff, was ‘attempting to do what Alexey Brodovitch had done in New York.’ That is, revolutionise fashion photography via a small group of new photographers – notably Sieff and Frank Horvat, who shared a studio for a while. He joined the Magnum photographic agency in 1958, before his fashion forays, and was applauded covering the death of Pope Pius XII. He worked for them throughout Europe until he left for New York and started with Harpers Bazaar, immersing himself in the diametrically opposed world of fashion. Remember, his use of a wide angle lenses in fashion and celebrity portraiture was groundbreaking at the time.

Jeanloup Sieff was born in Paris in 1933. After graduating in Philosophy in 1945, he began many different studies, each of them for a very little time including literature, journalism and photography at Vaugirard in Paris at Vevey in Switzerland. Jeanloup Sieff was born in Paris on November 30, 1933, to Polish parents. Like many a child of immigrants, he never really found where his own home was. ‘My childhood companion was solitude,’ he wrote. ‘A lost father – the wanderings of wartime. But I came to accept it and the pain it gave me.’ The son of Polish immigrants, Jeanloup Sieff discovered his passion for photography in Paris in the 1940s, when he received a camera for his 14th birthday. His breakthrough came only years later when he was given a commission from French magazine Elle. From then on, his list of clients rapidly increased, reading like a catalogue of who's who in the world of high gloss magazines such as Vogue, Esquire, Paris Match, and Harper’s Bazaar. It is not surprising therefore that Sieff is remembered particularly as a fashion photographer - a categorization against which he fought vehemently throughout his life. Besides well-known fashion photographs, a wide-range and comprehensive collection of reportage, portraits, nudes and landscape photographs was created. Without fail, his singular view through the lens continuously sought uniquely specific forms through a ubiquitous interplay of organic elements. Sieff argues that dancers have a 'corporeal intelligence' that enables them to fill space with their movements. 'Among the models I photograph for the fashion magazines, I recognize immediately the ones that have studied dance. They know how to carry their heads, they have a certain way of sitting and a natural elegance that the mastery of their bodies has shaped forever.'Marvelous,” said Sonia Sieff, when asked about her childhood with the late Jeanloup Sieff, her father and one of France’s great fashion photographers. “Marvelous, because he took good care of my brother and me … He taught us about the beauty in the world.” Long before Sonia’s birth, Jeanloup made his first fashion photo in 1952, and he spent the next two decades working for French Elle, Harper’s Bazaar, Queen, Jardin des Modes, and Vogue, producing some of the iconic images for which he’s now known — like Astrid Heeren, cigarillo-in-mouth, in Palm Beach. B&H – B&H is a world renowned supplier of all the gear photographers, videographers, and cinematographers need and want to create their very best work. He received his first camera, a Photax, from his uncle when he was no older than 14 years old. “If I hadn’t received that camera, today I’d maybe be an actor, film maker, writer or gigolo.” He was published for the first time in 1950 in Photo Revue. Four years later he decided to work as a freelance photographer, but his work was never published. He finally worked with Elle for 3 years before resigning to work for Magnum which he also resigned from a year later.

He was, unsurprisingly, a great admirer of the Anglo-German photographer Bill Brandt and the French painter Pierre Bonnard – both also great poets of the female bottom. ‘For it is the most protected, the most secret part of the body, and retains a childish innocence long since lost by gaze or hands.’ Jeanloup Sieff worked for four years as a freelance photographer. His work was never published. He got work for three years at Elle magazine. He resigned and joined Magnum, but resigned after a year.

On art …

Unlike the tyro triumvirate of Bailey, Duffy and Donovan, he had no class war to fight, no chips to oversalt his pictures. He made a world of fun, of play, putting photographs within photographs – pictures of himself even. These are images that know that they are images – and tell the viewer that. In a fashion magazine. His determined matter-of-factness about his work always had an air of disingenuousness about it. I imagine him watching people – especially the women – as he sits at his table at Café de Flore. In fact, Jeanloup Sieff writes in his memoirs: “With each woman that passes, I live out a love affair, fleeting but complete. When I see them some way off and their silhouette attracts me, our idyll begins. The closer they come, the more I love them. At ten metres it is passion; at six, painful jealousy; at four, it’s unbearable: the heart-rending separation has already begun. And by the time they pass me, I am released and relaxed and smile calmly at them. They have become my friends, and we can exchange the conspiratorial glance of those who have experienced many things together and remember them all.” Jeanloup Sieff was a star, one of the first French photographers to make it in America, a serial prizewinner (he won the Grand Prix National de la Photographie in 1992) and a big player in the commercial photography and advertising worlds. The other side of the same coin was that the artworld always treated him with a certain distance. He was too much the gentleman- amateur - in the tradition of Jacques-Henri Lartigue - to be fully accepted by the artworld, but then nor was he ever very sure that he wanted to be part of it either. He was an old-fashioned 'smudger': loving the very craft of photography and the life it led him. He affected a casual insouciance about his pictures, and didn't have much time for what he considered pretentious or laboured analysis. He revelled in a certain levity: 'I'm proud of the two adjectives superficial and frivolous', is how he put it in his last book. He liked a certain vulgarity, even thrived on it, but anybody who ever met him also remembers a man of tremendous erudition, who quoted the literature that he loved with a passion and grace that few could match. He was never lost for a quote. OLIVIER ZAHM — He’s famous for his nudes. How did he get his models to be so confident in front of his lens? Sieff called this the freezing of the instant into the permanence of effigy, the creation of "so many small whitestones helping us, according to our mood, rediscover feelings and forgotten faces".

There is very little doubt that it was the American and French cinema of the time that greatly influenced his work. His Vogue fashion shoots of wide angle and swinging London in the 1960s are some of the most recognizable images of the decade, …probably even more so than his contemporaries of the time. Ballet dancers of the day were a special interest he had, including the very famous Rudolph Nureyev, probably the most famous jet setting dancer of the time. When asked about this fascination with dance, he said he was attempting to capture the space filled with movement. Sieff was really trying to reproduce the French art masters, Rodin, Seurat, etc., in film, and applied this to his fashion shoots. 60’s Politics OLIVIER ZAHM — We really don’t know so much about his life. Was he a playboy in the ’70s and ’80s? Was he secretive? Paris. ‘Living with my Abyssinian cats, working for French Vogue, still wandering around with my old Leica.’ And that’s kind of how it was for the rest of his life. For a while, he was again the new kid in town, making pictures which brought the scent of the world to Paris – a city so often parochialised by its own self-regard. It was then and there he made the work that made him famous beyond the tight world of art directors – the nudes, luscious yet never lascivious. You never get the sense he was poking his lens through the keyhole – as you do in, say, Steichen. Nor, though, is there the dangerous thrill of Newton, let alone Mapplethorpe or Goldin. The archetypal – if not the best – Sieff image of female sexuality is the smart, sweet picture of his wife Barbara exposing her breasts in Death Valley, smiling. Like Brandt, like Courbet, he makes landscape and flesh seem like the same things. Jeanloup Sieff once described his approach which would become a personal hallmark as: “the pleasure in crazy light, the pleasure in making forms visible, to compose spaces and encounters”. The exhibition “Shadow Lines” unites his particular joy of photography, his unusual and often humorous pictorial language, and shows a compilation of dreamlike landscapes and poetic nudes from the late 1960s to the 1990s.OLIVIER ZAHM — Did your father also know the people around Saint Laurent — people like Betty Catroux, Loulou de la Falaise, Catherine Deneuve, and Charlotte Rampling? His true love of life,…not just photography,…is really the legacy left behind by Jeanloup Sieff. And it shows in his work. His books are some of the best monographs out there. And actual photos are available at very reasonable collector prices. ( a secret ) While he used a 21mm lens, probably the 28mm lens was used most with a Leica M4. Find Leica M4 or Find Leica 28mm or Find Leica 21mm Machine translation, like DeepL or Google Translate, is a useful starting point for translations, but translators must revise errors as necessary and confirm that the translation is accurate, rather than simply copy-pasting machine-translated text into the English Wikipedia. Mylio Photos – Access your photos from anywhere, without the cloud! Easily showcase your photos on-the-go, resolve duplicates, find faces and look for those stunning locations. A dandy all his life, early risers in Paris grew used to the longhaired and elegant man driving his tremendously stylish, vintage English sports car for an early breakfast in the St Germain district. It was always hard to tell how much of that playboy languor was only show; he certainly knew how to enjoy himself, but he was also a deeply serious man at the very top of his profession. Almost everybody knows a picture or two of Sieff's, even if they perhaps don't know that the image is his - and that is an extraordinary legacy.