New York Times, February 23 2003

Beauty and the Beast

By Tim Blanks

He was a runt of a man with a nasal whine that could drive anyone to distraction. He could make grown men cry, so he had no trouble squeezing tears out of his models. He'd make them dive in and out of swimming pools for days at a time. He'd balance them on a rock in the ocean during an electrical storm. He'd glue pearls all over their bodies so their skin could no longer breathe and they would black out. Or he'd render them entirely anonymous, painting out their beautiful features with white theatrical makeup.

He once handcuffed the supernally gorgeous Dominique Sanda to a metal bed frame in his studio while his assistants cornered the condom market and then inflated as many as possible and threw them under the bed until Sanda was all but afloat. Serge Gainsbourg was made to roll in the gutter again and again -- and again.

And it wasn't only models and celebrities who suffered the wicked peculiarities of Guy Bourdin's vision. Regardless of what Francine Crescent, his editor at French Vogue, might have logically expected when he returned from two weeks of shooting swimsuits in Tahiti, what she got was a single transparency of a row of pale-fleshed women, naked but for the red anthuriums sprouting between their legs. Though he may have taken 600 shots, the magazine never saw anything except this one image. Talk about the stuff of legend.

But myths attract moths, like the hundreds of people who would claim that they became close to James Dean after his death. Now it feels as if the same thing is happening with Bourdin, though the truth, as always, is a movable feast. Even those who were close, like Icaro Kosak, his assistant in his 1970's heyday, concede the essential unknowability of the man who, over the course of 33 years at French Vogue and 22 years of ad campaigns for Charles Jourdan shoes, altered the craft of image-making for all time. ''It's the elephant-in-the-dark effect,'' Kosak says. ''Everybody knows one bit of the story.''

Bourdin, himself, never showed any inclination to connect the dots. The power and perversity of his vision won him a gamut of comparisons, from Stanley Kubrick to the Marquis de Sade, but in his own eyes, he was un poete damne. In his life and work, he seemed almost masochistically bent on consummating the curse he felt had dogged him since childhood. Bourdin's mother left home in Paris soon after he was born, in 1928, and his father farmed him out to grandparents. Abandonment became a personal and professional leitmotif. How often in his pictures do the models float in stark isolation?

The exigencies of his private life suggest both masochism and sadism were bedfellows. His first wife was possibly a suicide; his second hanged herself. One girlfriend slashed her wrists. (She lived.) Another fell out of a tree. (She died.) Death came early for him, too (from cancer in 1991, at 62), and by then, his story had taken on a truly tragic tinge -- Chekhov or Gogol, maybe. (He loved his black Russians.) ''Guy wanted to be abandoned at the end, because that's what life's all about,'' Kosak claims. ''You're abandoned by your mother and your family. You have no friends, and you die alone in your bed. And even in death, you're being used and abused.''

Bourdin was an autodidact whose encyclopedic knowledge of art and literature would have ensured his familiarity with one of the first tenets of tragedy: the hero is complicit in his own downfall. So even the posthumous abuse he suffered was largely self-inflicted. Bourdin left his estate in a horrendous tax situation, paralyzing his legacy. Equally damaging was his unfathomable attitude toward his own work while he was alive. Unlike his peers Helmut Newton and Deborah Turbeville, who polished their reputations with coffee-table compilations and exhibitions, Bourdin said no to books, prints for collectors (no matter how powerful or insistent they might be) and interviews explaining himself. He even refused the Grand Prix National de la Photographie when it was offered to him. By the time he died, he'd guaranteed himself a degree of anonymity that was absolutely perverse for someone who, at his career peak not much more than a decade earlier, was probably the most idolized photographer in fashion. The death of his reputation was just one more suicide.

A much more promising proposition is the exhibition that is to open in April at the Victoria and Albert Museum in London. The curator Charlotte Cotton calls the show ''a hybrid between a retrospective and an introduction.'' Aside from never-before-shown films of the photographer at work, the focus of the exhibition is Bourdin's commercial work in the 70's and his extraordinary still-lifes.

So what is it that we see when we look at these pictures now? The taboos that Bourdin probed have been shattered (all of them, bar the notion of 10-year-olds in full makeup), but the thrill of the perverse still resonates in his photographs, and the power of his obsessions overwhelms. Couple them with a how-did-he-do-that? awe, and Bourdin makes more sense now than he did 20 years ago, in exactly the same way that Warhol's art and Hitchcock's movies grow in stature over time. Like them, Bourdin had a scarily acute understanding of the heart of darkness that pulsates under society's glossy exterior.

And like Warhol and Hitchcock, he drew his understanding from the personal experience of the outsider. It's Bourdin's still-lifes that are the giveaway: the warped perspectives, the desolation, the compulsive return to the same set of ingredients -- long grass, blank walls, a single pole spearing shadows, discombobulating domestic minutiae (never before did a plastic bag slung on a door handle look so menacing). Without knowing a single thing about the man, you can, for want of a better cliche, feel his pain.

In his introduction to ''Exhibit A,'' Luc Sante writes, ''For Bourdin, beauty never appeared without its accomplices death, filth and laughter.'' This unholy alliance was something so deeply felt by Bourdin that it makes it very unlikely his work will ever be duplicated, even by his spiritual children, the Davids of darkness, LaChapelle and Lynch. ''One of the last conversations we had was a massive row,'' Kosak says. ''Guy was saying, 'I love the Devil.' I'm very religious, and I said, 'Don't even say that,' and he started dancing around and screeching, 'Long live the Devil!' '' Kosak falls silent for a moment. ''I believe if you call him too much, he'll come and sit on your shoulder.''

Now, there's an image worthy of a Guy Bourdin photograph.
Not everyone remembers such a grim scenario. ''The easiest person I ever worked with, the most polite, the best educated,'' Francine Crescent says on the telephone from Paris. As well as giving him all the creative freedom a photographer could possibly wish for, Crescent, the former editor in chief of French Vogue, introduced him to Roland Jourdan, thus initiating more than two decades of benchmark fashion advertising. She was to all intents and purposes his fairy godmother. As for the scarring maternal void, Crescent does recall Bourdin's telling her that he favored models with pale red hair because they reminded him of his mother. ''He remembered her in a very romantic way,'' she adds benignly.

However bland such observations may be, they still help open doors to the psychology of the artist. The romance, for example. Painting was always Bourdin's passion, but often as not, his own pictures were mediocre derivatives of paintings by his hero Balthus, and he knew it, just as he knew he'd never be as good as his other idols, Francis Bacon and Stanley Spencer. ''He felt that he was inadequate, especially when he tried to take a brush in his hand,'' Kosak says.
So Bourdin picked up a camera. Though he worked as an aerial photographer during his military service in Dakar in the late 40's, it was a picture of a pepper by Edward Weston that clarified the aesthetic possibilities of photography for him. The monumental landscapes of Ansel Adams were another inspiration. And Bourdin's friendship with the pragmatic Man Ray helped him appreciate that commerce need not compromise creativity.

Even so, the camera never took over from the brush. Kosak recalls Bourdin treating his equipment the way a Roman emperor treated his slaves. The contempt was critical. It may be why he chose fashion -- the insecurity, ruthlessness and obsolescence appealed to his sense of inadequacy. It's all but irresistible to imagine him turning himself into something he hated just because he could never be what he really wanted to be.
And yet his painterly bent was actually the making of him as a photographer. ''What struck me most about Guy was that he was engaged in painting, art-directing reality and then photographing it,'' says the writer Joan Juliet Buck, who assisted him in the early 70's. ''It was laborious and not always successful.''

Throughout his career, he remained an artist manque, composing and reordering the elements he saw through his viewfinder until they matched the pictures he imagined in his head (and sketched in his notebooks). Except they never did. He could dye the sea bluer, paint the grass greener, arrange his models until they no longer looked human, but perfection was always just out of reach. The Hulcher 70 -- the camera used by NASA that could shoot 30 images a second with brilliant resolution -- helped him get as close to it as possible, but even then, the moment eluded him. Like Quixote, he was in pursuit of the impossible.

It's this pursuit that accounts for the incredible hold Bourdin exerts over fashion photographers. In the predigital era, before Photoshop made everything easy (or at least possible), Bourdin achieved his effects the old-fashioned way, with sets, props, makeup and his inexplicable tricks of light. The London gallery owner Michael Hoppen, a photographer himself, says, ''A lot of photographers will claim to be 100 percent original and say they never copied anyone else, but I think we're all proud to admit we copied Guy Bourdin.'' In 1994, the photographer Albert Watson offered one reason to The New Yorker: ''Guy was the closest thing to a fine-art photographer that this business has produced.''

That's why Hoppen spent much of the 90's trying to restore Bourdin's reputation. When he first entered the photographer's house in Normandy, he says, film was ''lying all over the floor, no order, no filing, no job numbers.''

''By the time all the tax issues were sorted out,'' he continues, ''the transparencies had suffered very badly in the damp.'' Hoppen worked closely with the photographer's son, Samuel, to collate a collection of images that would eventually tour galleries and form the basis of ''Exhibit A,'' published by Bulfinch Press in 2001. But for anyone who cherished memories of the original work -- never mind anyone who was unfamiliar with it -- both exhibition and book were disappointingly tame tributes.

A much more promising proposition is the exhibition that is to open in April at the Victoria and Albert Museum in London. The curator Charlotte Cotton calls the show ''a hybrid between a retrospective and an introduction.'' Aside from never-before-shown films of the photographer at work, the focus of the exhibition is Bourdin's commercial work in the 70's and his extraordinary still-lifes.

So what is it that we see when we look at these pictures now? The taboos that Bourdin probed have been shattered (all of them, bar the notion of 10-year-olds in full makeup), but the thrill of the perverse still resonates in his photographs, and the power of his obsessions overwhelms. Couple them with a how-did-he-do-that? awe, and Bourdin makes more sense now than he did 20 years ago, in exactly the same way that Warhol's art and Hitchcock's movies grow in stature over time. Like them, Bourdin had a scarily acute understanding of the heart of darkness that pulsates under society's glossy exterior.

And like Warhol and Hitchcock, he drew his understanding from the personal experience of the outsider. It's Bourdin's still-lifes that are the giveaway: the warped perspectives, the desolation, the compulsive return to the same set of ingredients -- long grass, blank walls, a single pole spearing shadows, discombobulating domestic minutiae (never before did a plastic bag slung on a door handle look so menacing). Without knowing a single thing about the man, you can, for want of a better cliche, feel his pain.

In his introduction to ''Exhibit A,'' Luc Sante writes, ''For Bourdin, beauty never appeared without its accomplices death, filth and laughter.'' This unholy alliance was something so deeply felt by Bourdin that it makes it very unlikely his work will ever be duplicated, even by his spiritual children, the Davids of darkness, LaChapelle and Lynch. ''One of the last conversations we had was a massive row,'' Kosak says. ''Guy was saying, 'I love the Devil.' I'm very religious, and I said, 'Don't even say that,' and he started dancing around and screeching, 'Long live the Devil!' '' Kosak falls silent for a moment. ''I believe if you call him too much, he'll come and sit on your shoulder.''
Now, there's an image worthy of a Guy Bourdin photograph.