JeanLoup Sieff
Jeanloup Sieff has my respect not only for the guttiness of his black and white aesthetic but also for his shooting nearly the entirety of it with, I believe, a 21mm lens on a Leica, including his fashion work. This I can only imagine must have taken a certain dedication and discipline. One lens might suggest a don’t-fix-it-if-it-ain’t-broke laziness, but trust me, there’s nothing lazy about doing good wide angle work, at all. Now, sure, you might counter that, say, Ralph Gibson manages equal personality in his B&W or you could point out the wide lenses William Klein’s early fashion work was shot on (i.e. that Seiff was just part of a gritty, wide angle generation), but there’s something else that set Seiff apart, and that was his not shying away from his love of a woman’s, to put it casually, ass. It was a form which he made beautiful in an apparent act of masculine adoration and desire but w/o ever letting this become anything less than a pulchritudinous depiction let alone a vulgar one.
Goes to show you that you can do whatever you want if you do it well.
photo: La femme est l’avenir de l’homme. 1995. © Jeanloup Seiff.
photo: Harper’s Bazaar. Madrid, 1966. © Jeanloup Seiff.
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