Jeanloup Sieff

JEANLOUP SIEFF (Paris, 1933-2000).
"Yves Saint Laurent, Paris, 1971.
Gelatin silver.
Signed and dated in ink (in the margin).
With artist's stamp on the reverse.
Provenance: private collection O'Hara New York.
Measurements: 30 x 31 cm (image); 40,7 x 31 cm (paper).

The photograph of Yves Saint Laurent taken by Jeanloup Sieff in Paris (1971) was taken during a period of great creativity in fashion and photography. Yves Saint Laurent was already a prominent figure in the fashion world, known for his revolutionary designs, and Sieff was already a renowned portraitist of great personalities. Jeanloup Sieff was known for his ability to capture the elegance and sensuality of his subjects. His distinctive style includes a masterful use of black and white playing with light and shadow. In this photograph, Sieff uses these techniques to highlight Saint Laurent's figure and character. By showing the designer nude, this image conveys the subject's vulnerability and his stripping of pretense, offering an intimate look at the man behind the fashion icon.

Jeanloup Sieff was a French photographer, his work has been recognized for his portraits of show business personalities and politicians, but also for his reportage, landscape and nude photographs. He was born in Paris on November 30, 1933 to parents of Polish origin. His studies after high school were brief: he studied Letters for two weeks, journalism for ten days, photography at the Vaugirard School in France for a month and then in Vevey Switzerland for seven months. His love for photography made him start as an "amateur" photographer at the age of fifteen, gradually raising his photographic quality to debut as a photojournalist in 1954. A year later he joined the magazine Elle, where he first made reports and then fashion photography until he left the magazine in 1959. That year he began working for Réalités and Le Jardin des Modes. He also left the Magnum agency to work on his own. He was awarded the Niépce Prize in 1959 for photographic excellence. In 1961, he settled in New York, where he collaborated with Look, Esquire, and mainly Harper's Bazaar. He had brief stays in Europe where he worked for Twen, Vogue and Queen. In 1967, she decided to move to Paris, where she worked for Vogue, Femme, Nova and other publications. He exhibited nationally and internationally and several of his works were acquired by various museums around the world. In 1971 she received the gold medal of the museum of modern art in Skopje and that same year she donated several collections to the National Library of Paris, which at that time did not have the funds to buy photographs by French authors. The most outstanding characteristic of his work is the use of black and white, mainly wide-angle shots and his dramatic hallmarks in the laboratory. His style shows the influence of surrealism and new objectivity. His work has received international awards from Japan to the United States and is distributed in different parts of the world. Among the awards he has received are the Niépce Prize in 1959 and the Grand Prix National de Photographie in 1992. He was named Knight of the Legion of Honor.