Guy Bourdin was born in Paris in 1928 and received his first photographic training whilst performing military service in Senegal in 1948?9. His photographs were first shown in Paris in 1952, the catalogue for which exhibition included an introduction by Man Ray, and he began working for French Vogue in 1954.

Inspired by Man Ray's brand of Surrealism, Bourdin rejected the descriptive roles of photography in favour of an exploration of the medium's capacity for the divergent. Along with certain American photographers, notably Edward Weston, Bourdin recognized a concern with formal perfection and extremely high finish that became his own objective, one perfectly adapted to the deceptive sophistication of fashion imagery, the landscape in which he developed his ideas for over thirty years.

Guy Bourdin (1928-1991) created some of the most challenging and seductive fashion photographs of the last century. He worked for Vogue Paris for over thirty years, from 1955 to 1987, and his images filled the pages of international fashion magazines throughout the 1970s and 1B80s in groundbreaking campaigns for Charles Jourdan, Bloomingdales and Dior. His glamorous, yet often surreal,work revolutionized the genre of fashion photography, presenting fashion as the luxurious embellishment rather than the subject of his images, which depict dark fantasies of lust, consumption and desire.Bourdin's legacy can still be seen in the work of photographers such as Stephen Meisel and Helmut Newton. This accessible monograph is the perfect introduction to his work.