Jeanloup Sieff: 40 Years of Photography

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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.'

His Death Valley and British landscape photos were considered by many political in nature, especially when incorporated in fashion work. But he tended to downplay that side of his work in the tumultuous 60’s. He never stopped taking pictures, though. Or pitching himself into the world. In 1986, he published two books, one of naked young women, one of a 1959 French miners strike – his anxieties often shaded his work with a desire to follow too many paths. He did campaigns for Patek Philippe watches. And he had one more moment in the sun of fame and fashionability. Most famously, most influentially, he was used in the early 1990s, to rebrand Häagen-Dazs ice cream with his sensuous – and smutless – nudes. Decades on, the atmosphere and imagery of those pictures is still resonant, still being used to sell us things.He died, aged 66, of cancer, in his beloved Paris on September 20, 2000. ‘I don’t believe in God,’ he had written. ‘But women and trees are proof of his existence.’ 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? SONIA SIEFF — He loved literature. He loved words. His secret dream was to become a writer and to win the Prix Goncourt! Portrait of Charlotte Rampling for Vogue France, 1970 He returned to Paris to produce assignments for Vogue, Elle and Nova. Additionally, he did advertising and personal projects. His work was wide-ranging. He made portraits of notables like Catherine Deneuve (opening photo, bottom row, center image) and fellow French photographers Jacques Henri Lartigue and Robert Doisneau. Jacques Henri Lartigue, 1972 and Robert Doisneau, 1975 portraits by Jeanloup Sieff. Multi-genres Jeanloup Sieff Credit: Gamma Rapho via Getty Images-Philippe PACHE.

Then, somehow, he went from tyro to elder statesman – maybe even has-been – seemingly without passing through the status between. He had a first act and a third but no second. ‘Can it be true that after 41 one merely repeats oneself? I refuse to believe it, but I fear it may be true.’ 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". 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.

OLIVIER ZAHM — We really don’t know so much about his life. Was he a playboy in the ’70s and ’80s? Was he secretive? 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'. 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. His photographs, however, communicate an undying fascination with the glossy world of the movies, of pleasurable lives lived under the Hollywood sky, of movie-still photography, where a moment of glamour is paused with all the expressionistic lighting effects of the film set still glowing. 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.

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. The great French photographer Jeanloup Sieff died on 20th September 2000 at the Laennec hospital in Paris. He was 66. 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.OLIVIER ZAHM — Was there something specific about your father’s photography that Saint-Laurent liked? 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. 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. Elle US, 1995."This is from the same series, and it was taken in Normandy... more Adriana Karembeu, fashion Dolce & Gabbana, Normandy, France, 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.

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. Jeanloup Sieff regards art this way: “I have always maintained that there is no such thing as art. There are only artists, producing things that give them pleasure, doing so under some compulsion, perhaps even finding the process painful, but deriving masochistic joy from it.” Fashion photos by Jeanloup Sieff Tamron – Need lightweight, compact mirrorless lenses? Tamron has you covered, with superior optics perfect for any situation. With weather sealing and advanced image stabilization, you’ll open up your creative possibilities. His work is owned by major museums in France, Germany, Switzerland and the US, and he exhibited in all those places as well as in London (where he held his first show in 1967) and Tokyo (where the erotic aspect of his work was well regarded). Other books, which eschewed silly titles, were called The Ballet (1962) or Best Nudes (1980) - although he couldn't resist calling one volume Bottoms (1994).

1933–2000

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 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. SONIA SIEFF — They all knew each other. In the early ’70s they dined together nearly every night, at La Coupole or Jeanloup’s studio. It’d be Betty and the band — Francois Catroux, Thade Klossowski, Clara Saint, Hélène Rochas, Paloma Picasso, François Marie Banier, Philippe Collin, and Claude and François-Xavier Lalanne. They’d go together to see shows at L’Alcazar and the Casino de Paris. SONIA SIEFF — He’d just say, “Just try it. It’s easier than you think.” And, magically, the women would get undressed.