portrait of a lunar and enigmatic genius

ARTE.TV – ON DEMAND – DOCUMENTARY

In one of his rare self-portraits, the fashion photographer Guy Bourdin (1928-1991), thick-framed glasses, still almost adolescent features, looks a bit like, in brown version, the British painter David Hockney and the American writer Truman Capote at the same age, with the same air of charming and impossible rascal.

Impossible, he was, as remembered by many witnesses interviewed by the Australian photographer and director Sean Brandt, former assistant to the photographer and author of Guy Bourdin, image creator. This beautiful documentary portrait is the tighter version of When the Sky Fell Down: The Myth of Guy Bourdin, a ninety-minute film on which the director has been working for many years and whose theatrical release is not yet specified.

Guy Bourdin could push the models to their limits, put them physically and mentally in danger. “It was psychological warfare!remembers one of them, Bridget Yorke. He manipulated us like a sadistic genius, but everyone respected him enormously. »

Highly inventive imagination

It happened to Guy Bourdin to disappear from shooting sessions, to sleep under sleeping pills for several days to provide his highly inventive imagination in dreams, in the service of a style that his colleague Sarah Moon qualified for “narrative ». Franca Sozzani, editor-in-chief of vogue Italian from 1988 to 2016, provides: “He wasn’t overplaying madness, he was really like that. »

Edmonde Charles Rouxat the head of vogue French from 1954 to 1966, recounts his meeting with Bourdin, who had deposited a few prints, implying that it was to take it or leave it. She will take him under contract, but will leave him the bridle on his neck, as evidenced by his first achievements for the magazine, in 1955, where a model in a Balenciaga hat poses in front of rabbit carcasses and calf heads.

His universe, very often described as surrealist, and not without reason − Man Ray will patronize it from the start, prefacing the catalog of his first exhibition, in 1952 −, strikes by its Buñuelian, lunar, strongly sexual and sadomasochistic aspect – “that the little masters of chic porn have ceased to plunder, minus the talent”wrote Laurence Benaïm, in The world of December 15, 2001.

The use of color will make this universe even more disturbing, Bourdin displaying his taste for bright red, which comes out of the nostrils of a woman on the ground, from a power socket, which tints the very phallic stick with a red lips or scoops of crushed cone ice cream. True blood appealed to him, which he tried to photograph at crime scenes or while waiting for a cat to tear a mouse apart.

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