JEANLOUP SIEFF died of cancer at the age of 66 in September 2000 at the Laennec Hospital, not far from where he was born in Paris. The son of Polish émigrés, it is the outsider’s role to look beyond oneself, beyond the obvious. In his images, in his nudes as well as his landscapes, there is a feeling of the world going on beyond the image – the inner life of the catwalk model, the dancer, the universe beyond the shifting desert and craggy coastline. He was the eternal stranger. No doubt he read Albert Camus as well as Proust.
At the age of 14, the young Jeanloup was given a Photax plastic camera as a birthday present. It was 1947, two years after the end of the World War II and he began recording the lost Paris of his childhood. He was enrolled at the Vaugirard School of Photography in Paris in 1953, and subsequently continued his studies in Switzerland at the Vevey School.
Even as a student, Sieff began earning his own living and by 1954, at the age of 21, he was working as a freelance reporter. Only two years later he was shooting for the fashion magazines and by 1958 he had joined the famous Magnum Agency, travelling to Italy, Greece, Poland and Turkey.
By the 1960’s, his assignments for Esquire, Glamour, Vogue and Harpers Bazaar took him to the United States. Sieff was always trying new ways of shooting women’s fashion, showing models not merely as mannequins on which the clothes were hung, but as living people with an inner reality. It was a time of innovation, new equipment, new thinking, and while Sieff was developing his style, two other Europeans new to the American continent were exploring the same field. It is probably not a coincidence that, like Sieff, Helmut Newton and Frank Horvat were both displaced from the post-war confusion in Europe and, like Sieff, remained the eternal outsiders. Newton was born in Germany and fled to Australia; Horvat was born in Abbazia, an area of Italy that would be renamed Opatija and become a part of Croatia.
‘All aspects of photography interest me… 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'
Sieff was captivated by what he called ‘the pleasure of those maddening lights,’ and in the United States adopted a more severe style, experimenting with black and white contrasts and extending his range. He shot thousands of feet of film in Death Valley. He captured dancers in all stages of their craft, from preparation to performance, his severe images embodying the dancer’s battle to reach an impossible perfection. Sieff captured haunting, evocative images of Hollywood legends such as Alfred Hitchcock, Howard Hawks, Kirk Douglas. On trips to Europe he created memorable portraits of Jane Birkin, Yves Montand, Rudolf Nureyev, Charlotte Rampling, Catherine Deneuve and Jean-Paul Sartre, always showing facets of these well-known figures that had never before been revealed.
During the mid-60’s there was a new sense of liberation, the dancers in Jerome Ragni’s cult musical, Hair, were performing naked on stage and Jeanloup Sieff started what would become perhaps the best known aspect of his work – shooting nudes. He told Bill Jay in an interview for his book, Views on Nudes, ‘All aspects of photography interest me… 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. There are no reasons for my photographs, nor any rules; all depends on the mood of the moment, on the mood of the model’.
Sieff always maintained that his work was superficial, but his dedication and patience is clear in the end result. His shots of female nudes, often with wide-angle distortion, principally in black and white, have a grainy finish and chiaroscuro effect that draw us into the image and into the very soul of the subject. It is not surprising that in his lifetime he won many top awards including the Chevalier des Arts et Lettres in Paris, 1981, and the Grand Prix National de la Photographie in 1992.
www.jeanloupsieff.com
Clifford Thurlow is a screenwriter, journalist, and the former correspondent for
The Observer in Athens. He has written more than a dozen books. Most recently he co-authored with Captain James Ashcroft the explosive Making A Killing: The Story of a Hired Gun in Iraq. Clifford is based in London and Spain.
