Jeanloup Sieff
Photographer

Born in Paris to Polish parents Jeanloup Sieff (1933–2000) began shooting fashion photography in 1956 and joined the Magnum Agency in 1958, which enabled him to travel extensively. Settling in New York for much of the sixties he worked for Esquire, Harper’s Bazaar, Vogue and Elle, photographing celebrities such as Jane Birkin, Yves Saint-Laurent, Rudolf Nureyev and Alfred Hitchcock amongst others. Sieff won numerous prizes including the Prix Niepce, the Chevalier des Arts et Lettres in Paris in 1981 and the Grand Prix National de la Photographie in 1992, and his work is housed in many private and international collections.

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.

With great tenacity, Sieff pursued a personal and highly effective signature style, soaked in playful imagination with a touch of irony. Seldom working in color he favored the discipline of black and white, often using to his advantage the spatial distortion of wide-angle lenses, the dramatic potential of shadow and exploitation of tone.

“I have always maintained that there is no such thing as art. There are only artists, producing things that give them pleasure, doing so under some compulsion, perhaps even finding the process painful, but deriving a masochistic joy from it!” –Jeanloup Sieff

Jeanloup Sieff
Photographer

Born in Paris to Polish parents Jeanloup Sieff (1933–2000) began shooting fashion photography in 1956 and joined the Magnum Agency in 1958, which enabled him to travel extensively. Settling in New York for much of the sixties he worked for Esquire, Harper’s Bazaar, Vogue and Elle, photographing celebrities such as Jane Birkin, Yves Saint-Laurent, Rudolf Nureyev and Alfred Hitchcock amongst others. Sieff won numerous prizes including the Prix Niepce, the Chevalier des Arts et Lettres in Paris in 1981 and the Grand Prix National de la Photographie in 1992, and his work is housed in many private and international collections.

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.

With great tenacity, Sieff pursued a personal and highly effective signature style, soaked in playful imagination with a touch of irony. Seldom working in color he favored the discipline of black and white, often using to his advantage the spatial distortion of wide-angle lenses, the dramatic potential of shadow and exploitation of tone.

“I have always maintained that there is no such thing as art. There are only artists, producing things that give them pleasure, doing so under some compulsion, perhaps even finding the process painful, but deriving a masochistic joy from it!” –Jeanloup Sieff

  • Lutz Bacher: AYE!
    Oct 5 – Dec 17, 2023
    Raven Row
    London, UK
    This exhibition of the unsettling, uncategorisable work of American artist Lutz Bacher (1943–2019) explores her use of music, sound and voice. Bacher’s work oscillates between the conceptual and the visceral. Much of it involves appropriation, using material from American popular culture and flotsam from the information age (pulp fiction, self-help manuals, trade magazines, scientific publications, pornography, bureaucracy, discarded photographs), in work that can be intimate, violent or funny. (more…)
  • Adam Pendleton: To Divide By
    Sep 22, 2023 – Jan 15, 2024
    Mildred Lane Kemper Art Museum
    St. Louis, USA
    “What is your name?” “Where are you from?” “How did you end up here?” “Can you feel it?” “Does it hurt?” With these and other questions, the American artist Adam Pendleton’s solo exhibition at the Mildred Lane Kemper Art Museum sets up an elaborate call-and-response network that articulates a sense of history as fragmented poetics. The exhibition will showcase a polyvocal assemblage of new and recent paintings, drawings, and video portraits that together reveal Pendleton’s interest in creating a conversation between mediums, as well as his belief in abstraction’s capacity to destabilize and disrupt. (more…)