It’s with great pleasure that Brucie Collections Gallery presents to you the works by the black and white photography wizard Jeanloup Sieff – aт author genuinely gifted in every genre from fashion and advertising photo work to highly artistic portraits and landscapes. 

Jeanloup Sieff was born in 1933 in Paris, to parents of Polish origin. His first camera was a cheap Photax that he received as a present at the age of 14. As the artist recalled, he’d got hooked on photography while taking photos of newly met girls at the Polish resort of Zakopane. At 23 Sieff started working as a fashion photographer and two years later he joined the legendary Magnum agency. In early 60s the author moved to New York with an ambition to work for one of the most famous publishers Harper’s Bazaar.

Jeanloup Sieff went down in history as an ingenious fashion photographer with a gust of capturing one or another piece of apparel in the most attractive way.  It’s due to his photographs that some well-know couturiers’ works became iconic and memorable. Sieff managed to work out an erotic lexis of his own where there was a place both for fashion and for nude: exquisite bare backs, delicate curves and lingerie.

Dresses and, first of all, woman’s body, turned into lines and fabric in an eccentric and refined framing picked up by the master. “Every woman’s photograph of Jeanloup Sieff’s is like Mona Lisa’s portrait. He was able to catch something akin the smile of Gioconda. In his works the author conveyed something that other didn’t even notice in life”, says a well-known photography collector Gert Elfering.        

Fashion served as a mere pretext for creating surreal and elegant atmosphere that reminds one of Hitchcock movies. “When photographing models I’m interested not in dresses (except Saint-Laurent dresses of course) but the girl herself and the entourage she’s in”, the photographer reflected.            

Sieff photographed such celebrities as Jane Birkin, Yves Montand, Alfred Hitchcock, Jacques-Henri Lartigue, Yves Saint-Laurent, and Rudolf Nureyev among many others. He worked for every big magazine including Elle, Vogue, Esquire, Glamour and Harper's Bazaar, shot the scandalous Yves Saint Laurent ad campaign starring the naked designer, reported the Pope’s death and the Belgian miners’ strike, he did landscapes in Scotland and Californian Death Valley and portrayed dancers of Opéra de Paris.        

Jeanloup Sieff won a number of professional awards, including the Prix Niepce, the Grand Prix National de la Photographie (France). The photographer’s art was highly acknowledged honoring him with the Chevalier des Arts et Lettres in 1981 one of the most prestigious tributes France has.

The author died at the age of 66, giving almost 40 years of his life to photography and leaving after himself, without overstatement, the heritage of the black and white genius.   

See the works of Jeanloup Sieff and touch on the heritage of the genius photography artist in Brucie Collections Gallery starting March 20^th 2014.