Guy Bourdin: Image Maker

Guy Bourdin, fashion photographer, 'Image Maker'.
The same day I went with friends to see this exhibition at Somerset House, London,
The Sun newspaper announced the end of page three*.
So image, particularly images of women, was a hot topic of conversation.
Men taking photos of women.
Women's bodies used to sell things.

During his training, Guy Bourdin spent time with the surrealist, Man-Ray.

Bourdin seems to have had a thing for shoes.
In the 1970s, for a Charles Jourdan advertising campaign,
Bourdin dispensed with the women altogether, well most of the female body,
and took mannequin legs around Britain  on a month long trip to take photos of shoes.

Very playful and still very much the female form.

A bit like one of those optical illusions when all that is drawn are dots,

but you can't help seeing a 3D cube.

"How on earth did he get them to stand up?"

Bourdin made films too.

There was something about that make-up.
Triggering memories of experimenting with cream eye-shadow that came out of tubes.
Blue for my friend and brown for me.
At this point, my friend admitted to still having her first pale pearl lipstick.

Joyfully we reminisced about lip-gloss,
Roll-on, scented, cherry, lip-gloss.

"There's your blue eye-shadow!"

In our teens, where did our ideas of self image, beauty,
make-up and body shape come from?
We conferred and it seems that for us, it was primarily Jackie magazine.
If you were lucky, a lip-gloss was the free-gift.

"But we didn't appreciate our figures when we were younger."

There's so much to say about the shapes of women's bodies.
This furniture is a reminder of yet another body shape.
My Sindy doll had that chest of drawers, the 'Sindy' version.
Sindy's body shape; waist, bust and hips, surely not aspirational anymore.

Aspirational?
Didn't we all want to be a princess (and the pea)?

Incredible shape,

movement,

and legs.

 Playing with shape.

Bourdin's photography is intended, like surrealism, to disturb then delight.
For us it did both.
Delight and consternation.
Questions about body shapes, modelling at what price,
how women's bodies are used for publicity
and although not page three, all the women in this exhibition where the same shape.

So for balance, here are our shapes.

Guy Bourdin: Image Maker is on at Somerset House until 15th March 2015.
Details on the Somerset House website, here.

*The Sun stopping 'page 3', appears to ave been a publicity stunt.
It stopped for all of two days.