Guy Bourdin: A Message for You

With the eye of a painter, Guy Bourdin created images that contained fascinating stories, compositions and colors. He radically broke conventions of commercial photography with a relentless perfectionism and sharp humor. Famed for his suggestive narratives and surreal aesthetics, Bourdin used fashion photography to explore the realm between the absurd and the sublime. Now in its third edition, 'A Message for You' is a road trip through Bourdin's visual landscape, a collage of images that maps his artistic search and vision. The texts, Polaroids, poems, sketches and contact sheets unfold in real time through the memories of model Nicolle Meyer, a muse to Bourdin. Given total creative freedom and with an uncompromising artistic ethic, Bourdin captured the imagination of a whole generation. The late 1970s, recognized as the pinnacle of his career, are the focus of this monograph, which is the last of eight books exploring his most outstanding and undiscovered work so far.