Jeanloup Sieff: 40 Years of Photography

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He always stressed the pleasure of taking photos. If his favourite source of that pleasure was in what was behind us, it was also in behinds themselves. No one can ever have been more taken by and taken more pictures of female bottoms. (In French, derrières.) Not arses, note. Or bums. Bottoms, always. ‘It is the bottom that remembers; it faces the past, whereas we advance inexorably into the future,’ he wrote. 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. 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. 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.

OLIVIER ZAHM — As a photo­grapher, how do you detach yourself from such a rich and strong heritage? Elle US, 1995."This is from the same series, and it was taken in Normandy... more Adriana Karembeu, fashion Dolce & Gabbana, Normandy, France, His true love of life,…not just photography,…is really the legacy left behind by Jeanloup Sieff. And it shows in his work. His books are some of the best monographs out there. And actual photos are available at very reasonable collector prices. ( a secret ) While he used a 21mm lens, probably the 28mm lens was used most with a Leica M4. Find Leica M4 or Find Leica 28mm or Find Leica 21mmThough his Vogue fashion shoots of fur-trimmed and pampered London in the 1960s are some of the most recognizable of the decade, Sieff also took countless opportunities to photograph dancers. Possibly his most important project is his chronicle of dancers who have appeared with the Paris Opera Ballet, including Rudolph Noureev, Carolyn Carlson, Claire Motte and Nina Vyroubova. If there is a typical Sieff model, she is a teenage dancer with gathered up hair, pictured at practice, flexed and craning. Jeanloup Sieff was born in Paris on November 30, 1933, to Polish parents. Like many a child of immigrants, he never really found where his own home was. ‘My childhood companion was solitude,’ he wrote. ‘A lost father – the wanderings of wartime. But I came to accept it and the pain it gave me.’ 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. 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.

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? By the seventies, Jeanloup’s studio doubled as a salon for Paris’s boldface names. “My father was really close with Yves Saint Laurent and Pierre Bergé, and a handful of other people in their group — Loulou de la Falaise, Betty and François Catroux, Hélène Rochas, Thadée Klossowski, Fernando Sánchez, and Paloma Picasso — whom they saw regularly over the course of a few years,” Sonia told us. “They were all really, really creative. Everyone had a place — Yves was the designer, my father was the photographer, François-Xavier and Claude Lalanne were the sculptors, François-Marie Banier, the writer. They had big dinners, they would film each other, they all did projects together — my father took that very famous image of Yves Saint Laurent nude. They did it all so easily and with humor, without taking it so seriously. Maybe that’s why everything turned out so well.” 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.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.