Nature and landscape, fashion and nude: the French photographer Jeanloup Sieff moves masterfully throughout genres establishing himself as one of the great talents in the history of photography. The exhibition Shadow Lines at Galerie 36 in Berlin offers a comprehensive and very personal view of Jeanloup Sieff´s work. Featuring 48 photographs, this exhibition shows him as an artist who has not only chosen to utilize the wide-angle lens to achieve a strikingly cinematic approach, but also as one who challenges the limits of black and white photography through an unusual play of light and shadow.
Jeanloup Sieff once described his approach which would become a personal hallmark as “the pleasure in crazy light, the pleasure in making forms visible, to compose spaces and encounters”. These photographs unite his particular joy of photography, his unusual and often humorous pictorial language, and shows a compilation of dreamlike landscapes and poetic nudes from the late 1960s to the 1990s.
The son of Polish immigrants, Jeanloup Sieff discovered his passion for photography in Paris in the 1940s, when he was gifted a camera for his 14th birthday. His breakthrough came only years later when he was given a commission from French magazine Elle. From then on, his list of clients rapidly increased, reading like a catalogue of who’s who in the world of high gloss magazines such as Vogue, Esquire, Paris Match, and Harper’s Bazaar. It is not surprising therefore that Sieff is remembered particularly as a fashion photographer – a categorization against which he fought vehemently throughout his life. Besides well-known fashion photographs, he created a wide-range and comprehensive collection of reportage, portraits, nudes and landscapes.
Jeanloup Sieff, Shadow Lines
September 28th – December 16th 2017
Galerie 36
Chausseestraße 36
10115 Berlin
Germany
http://galerie36berlin.com/
