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

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. SONIA SIEFF — They all knew each other. In the early ’70s they dined together nearly every night, at La Coupole or Jeanloup’s studio. It’d be Betty and the band — Francois Catroux, Thade Klossowski, Clara Saint, Hélène Rochas, Paloma Picasso, François Marie Banier, Philippe Collin, and Claude and François-Xavier Lalanne. They’d go together to see shows at L’Alcazar and the Casino de Paris. Unlike the tyro triumvirate of Bailey, Duffy and Donovan, he had no class war to fight, no chips to oversalt his pictures. He made a world of fun, of play, putting photographs within photographs – pictures of himself even. These are images that know that they are images – and tell the viewer that. In a fashion magazine. His determined matter-of-factness about his work always had an air of disingenuousness about it. There is very little doubt that it was the American and French cinema of the time that greatly influenced his work. His Vogue fashion shoots of wide angle and swinging London in the 1960s are some of the most recognizable images of the decade, …probably even more so than his contemporaries of the time. Ballet dancers of the day were a special interest he had, including the very famous Rudolph Nureyev, probably the most famous jet setting dancer of the time. When asked about this fascination with dance, he said he was attempting to capture the space filled with movement. Sieff was really trying to reproduce the French art masters, Rodin, Seurat, etc., in film, and applied this to his fashion shoots. 60’s Politics 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 21mmHe 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. He was, unsurprisingly, a great admirer of the Anglo-German photographer Bill Brandt and the French painter Pierre Bonnard – both also great poets of the female bottom. ‘For it is the most protected, the most secret part of the body, and retains a childish innocence long since lost by gaze or hands.’ 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.

OLIVIER ZAHM — He’s famous for his nudes. How did he get his models to be so confident in front of his lens? Though 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.Sieff argues that dancers have a 'corporeal intelligence' that enables them to fill space with their movements. 'Among the models I photograph for the fashion magazines, I recognize immediately the ones that have studied dance. They know how to carry their heads, they have a certain way of sitting and a natural elegance that the mastery of their bodies has shaped forever.' 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.”

His Death Valley and British landscape photos were considered by many political in nature, especially when incorporated in fashion work. But he tended to downplay that side of his work in the tumultuous 60’s. 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. Mylio Photos – Access your photos from anywhere, without the cloud! Easily showcase your photos on-the-go, resolve duplicates, find faces and look for those stunning locations.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. 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.” He died, aged 66, of cancer, in his beloved Paris on September 20, 2000. ‘I don’t believe in God,’ he had written. ‘But women and trees are proof of his existence.’ Elle magazine and fashion shoots. 1958: Magnum, the unlikeliest of homes for such a sensualist. 1959: Jardin des Modes and a tight working relationship with the magazine’s art director Jacques Moutin who, according to Sieff, was ‘attempting to do what Alexey Brodovitch had done in New York.’ That is, revolutionise fashion photography via a small group of new photographers – notably Sieff and Frank Horvat, who shared a studio for a while. 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.’

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. 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.’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. OLIVIER ZAHM — We really don’t know so much about his life. Was he a playboy in the ’70s and ’80s? Was he secretive? Elle US, 1995."This is from the same series, and it was taken in Normandy... more Adriana Karembeu, fashion Dolce & Gabbana, Normandy, France, 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.’