Jeanloup Sieff: 40 Years of Photography

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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 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". 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.’

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. In the collective imagination, the Seventies were considered a period of accumulation: of styles, ideas, images and colours. Jeanloup Sieff worked by elimination. The set was reduced to a bare minimum, lighting was calibrated to an almost unreal perfection, and the body emerged in all of its purest simplicity. Sieff made an aesthetic choice that was an important statement: he opted for the freedom of portraying beauty that transcended the aesthetic rules of those years. He continued to amaze us through images that were only apparently simple. In that decade of confusion, Jeanloup Sieff created a world of unity and harmony. He did not portray fashion the way it was or the way it should have been, but seemed to arrange elements in a new socio-sensual narrative. 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.

1933–2000

All aspects of photography interest me,” Sieff says, “and I feel for the female body the same curiosity and the same love as for a landscape, a face or anything else which interests me. In any case, the nude is a form of landscape.” Sieff is heralded as one of the great international photographic talents of the last half-century and has left an undeniable imprint on his generation. Prolific in many fields, the variety of his imagery highlights his broad artistry, ranging from fashion, nudes, landscape and portraiture. 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.

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. 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.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.