He received his first camera, a Photax, from his uncle when he was no older than 14 years old. “If I hadn’t received that camera, today I’d maybe be an actor, film maker, writer or gigolo.” He was published for the first time in 1950 in Photo Revue. Four years later he decided to work as a freelance photographer, but his work was never published. He finally worked with Elle for 3 years before resigning to work for Magnum which he also resigned from a year later. 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.

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.'

Artwork

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. He returned to Paris to produce assignments for Vogue, Elle and Nova. Additionally, he did advertising and personal projects. His work was wide-ranging. He made portraits of notables like Catherine Deneuve (opening photo, bottom row, center image) and fellow French photographers Jacques Henri Lartigue and Robert Doisneau. Jacques Henri Lartigue, 1972 and Robert Doisneau, 1975 portraits by Jeanloup Sieff. Multi-genres Jeanloup Sieff Credit: Gamma Rapho via Getty Images-Philippe PACHE. 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 was tall, elegant with an eye for beauty where ever he looked. A model’s face can be hiding anywhere, even on a New York City cop (opening photo, top left image). He was French; his parents were Polish. An uncle gave him a Photax camera when he was 14 years old. Sieff said of it “If I hadn’t received that camera, today I’d maybe be an actor, filmmaker, writer or gigolo.”

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. 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. The impulse that led you to make an image is a thing that you cannot share with anyone, even if you explain it. What remains is a surface that will live its own life, that will belong to everybody. I accept that surface.” -Jeanloup Seiff Jeanloup Sieff 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. B&H – B&H is a world renowned supplier of all the gear photographers, videographers, and cinematographers need and want to create their very best work.OLIVIER ZAHM — Was there something specific about your father’s photography that Saint-Laurent liked? Jeanloup Sieff once described his approach which would become a personal hallmark as: “the pleasure in crazy light, the pleasure in making forms visible, to compose spaces and encounters”. The exhibition “Shadow Lines” unites his particular joy of photography, his unusual and often humorous pictorial language, and shows a compilation of dreamlike landscapes and poetic nudes from the late 1960s to the 1990s.

Consider adding a topic to this template: there are already 5,876 articles in the main category, and specifying |topic= will aid in categorization. OLIVIER ZAHM — What was the relationship between your father, the photographer Jeanloup Sieff and Yves SaintJeanloup 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 — Did your father also know the people around Saint Laurent — people like Betty Catroux, Loulou de la Falaise, Catherine Deneuve, and Charlotte Rampling? 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