The comprehensive Guy Bourdin retrospective at the House of Photography will be complemented by a selection of some 40 works from the F.C. Gundlach Collection, which are similar in terms of both subject matter and content to the oeuvre of Guy Bourdin. Curated by Dr. Sabine Schnakenberg, the cabinet exhibition »En compagnie de Guy Bourdin / In the company of Guy Bourdin«, explores three periods of time that have close associations with the work of Bourdin. Accordingly, the works of Man Ray and Edward Weston, who influenced Bourdin’s work but also Dora Maar, Erwin Blumenfeld, Horst P. Horst, George Platt-Lynes and Harry Meerson highlight this topic from a largely historical perspective.
At the same time that Bourdin was active as a photographer Helmut Newton, Deborah Turbeville, Chris von Wangenheim, William Klein, not to mention Charles Wilp and Melvin Sokolsky produced fashion shots, which also attest to the inspiring force of the 1960s and 1970s. Finally, contemporary photographers such as David LaChapelle and Tim Walker, but also Ellen von Unwerth, Kristian Schuller, Armin Morbach and Olaf Martens present images, which require an in-depth conscious and unconscious familiarity with Bourdin’s photographs in order to arrive at highly individual and playful extensions of them.
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