Guy Bourdin got liftoff like so many photographers before him—he was given a chance at Vogue. In 1955, an editor hired him to shoot hats by the renowned French milliner Claude Saint-Cyr. Bourdin did so shockingly: the backdrop he chose was a butcher shop, carcasses hanging, in Les Halles. The gamble paid off. When the photographs were published, the calves’ heads were cropped out of the frames, but the 26-year-old had Vogue’s approval.
By the mid-1960s, Bourdin’s cheeky, racy style was a fixture at the magazine. In March 1966, when he shot a pair of Charles Jourdan kitten heels for Pierre Cardin—a close-up of long, spindly legs in red tights—the image landed on the cover. A year later, Bourdin photographed eight Charles Jourdan heels by Karl Lagerfeld stacked on the arms of a naked model. “He never takes the same photo twice, he surpasses himself,” Vogue stated that year. “He doesn’t imitate himself: we imitate him.”
Roland Jourdan—Charles Jourdan’s creative director at the time—was sold. The company had long embraced an avant-garde philosophy, and it became Bourdin’s patron, giving him exclusivity on all of its advertising campaigns from 1967 to 1979.
Bourdin’s imagination ran wild. He shot ads horizontally instead of vertically to create two-page spreads. He understood the flat affect of America’s Pop aesthetic and introduced violence into his mise-en-scènes: a staged car accident, a heap of fragmented mannequins, shoes lying in the rubble. Offended readers wrote indignant letters to the publications; meanwhile, the magazine Photo dedicated entire portfolios to Bourdin’s campaigns.
“It was as if we were publishing not advertisements but a paperback novel or a comic strip,” Gérard Tavenas, Jourdan’s director of advertising, said at the time. “People were hungry to see what was next.”
In the new book Guy Bourdin for Charles Jourdan, the curator Patrick Remy has put together the advertisements Bourdin shot for the shoe brand, between 1967 and 1983. They are not just ads but mysteries, hauntings, jokes, puzzles, and art-historical puns. In short, they are events that both inflamed and revolutionized the field of photography. “The most important thing for a photographer,” Bourdin once said, “is to see things others don’t see.” —Elena Clavarino
Elena Clavarino is a Senior Editor at AIR MAIL
