In Between

Guy Bourdin’s fashion photography placed him at the vanguard of fashion photography in the second half of the twentieth century; today he is hailed as one of the finest fashion photographers of the twentieth century. From his first provocative editorial feature in 1955,which pictured haute couture alongside butchered cow heads, Bourdin pushed fashion photography into then-uncharted territory with his volatile mixture of violence, sex and surrealism. In Between delves into Bourdin’s career, charting the course of his artistic development from the 1950s to the 1980s via over 200 superbly printed black-and-white and color images. It also reassembles many original editorial layouts as they were first published, in magazines such as French Vogue, British Vogue and Harper’s Bazaar, offering a new critical contexts for approaching his work—for Bourdin tailored his compositions to the constraints of the printed page, both conceptually and graphically, and the mirror motif famously central to his work finds its formal counterpart in the magazine spread. In Between was conceived and edited by Shelly Verthime,whose unflagging devotion and research have resulted in an unprecedented familiarity with the photographer’s oeuvre, and is the second publication in Steidldangin’s Guy Bourdin library (A Message For You, published in 2006, explored the author’s collaboration with model and muse Nicolle Meyer). This book celebrates a talent whose posthumous fame continues to grow and grow.