Guy Bourdin: A Message for You

Guy Bourdin created images containing fascinating stories, compositions and colors. Using fashion photography as his medium, Bourdin explored the provocative and the sublime with a relentless perfectionism and sharp humor, breaking with the conventions of commercial photography and capturing the imagination of a generation. The late 1970s, widely recognized as the high note of his career, is the focal point of this new edition, which combines in one book the two volumes of the original 2006 publication. The first part of A Message for You shows the legendary, nearly forgotten images and rarely seen variants of a single model, Nicolle Meyer. She appeared in over 30 of Bourdin's famous campaigns for Charles Jourdan and in iconic French Vogue editorials. The second part of the book explores Bourdin's pictorial landscape in a collage of images that maps his artistic vision. The texts, Polaroids, poems, sketches and contact sheets are interspersed with Nicolle Meyer's recollections.
With the eye of a painter Guy Bourdin created images containing fascinating stories, compositions and colours. Using fashion photography as his medium, Bourdin explored the provocative and the sublime with a relentless perfectionism and sharp humour. Famed for his suggestive narratives and surreal aesthetics, Bourdin radically broke conventions of commercial photography and in the process captured the imagination of a generation. The late 1970s, recognised as the high note of his career, is the focal point of this new edition, which combines in one book the two volumes of the original 2006 publication. The first part of A Message for You shows the legendary, nearly forgotten images and rarely seen variants of a single model, Nicolle Meyer. She appeared in over thirty of Bourdin's famous campaigns for Charles Jourdan and in iconic French Vogue editorials. The second part of the book explores Bourdin's pictorial landscape, a collage of images that maps his artistic vision. The texts, Polaroids, poems, sketches and contact sheets unfold through Nicolle Meyer's memories and capture moments of Bourdin's work in progress.