Jeanloup Sieff was born in Paris in 1933. After graduating in Philosophy in 1945, he began many different studies, each of them for a very little time including literature, journalism and photography at Vaugirard in Paris at Vevey in Switzerland. OLIVIER ZAHM — Was there something specific about your father’s photography that Saint-Laurent liked? His Death Valley and British landscape photos were considered by many political in nature, especially when incorporated in fashion work. But he tended to downplay that side of his work in the tumultuous 60’s. A dandy all his life, early risers in Paris grew used to the longhaired and elegant man driving his tremendously stylish, vintage English sports car for an early breakfast in the St Germain district. It was always hard to tell how much of that playboy languor was only show; he certainly knew how to enjoy himself, but he was also a deeply serious man at the very top of his profession. Almost everybody knows a picture or two of Sieff's, even if they perhaps don't know that the image is his - and that is an extraordinary legacy.

Jeanloup Sieff was a star, one of the first French photographers to make it in America, a serial prizewinner (he won the Grand Prix National de la Photographie in 1992) and a big player in the commercial photography and advertising worlds. The other side of the same coin was that the artworld always treated him with a certain distance. He was too much the gentleman- amateur - in the tradition of Jacques-Henri Lartigue - to be fully accepted by the artworld, but then nor was he ever very sure that he wanted to be part of it either. He was an old-fashioned 'smudger': loving the very craft of photography and the life it led him. He affected a casual insouciance about his pictures, and didn't have much time for what he considered pretentious or laboured analysis. He revelled in a certain levity: 'I'm proud of the two adjectives superficial and frivolous', is how he put it in his last book. He liked a certain vulgarity, even thrived on it, but anybody who ever met him also remembers a man of tremendous erudition, who quoted the literature that he loved with a passion and grace that few could match. He was never lost for a quote. In the collective imagination, the Seventies were considered a period of accumulation: of styles, ideas, images and colours. Jeanloup Sieff worked by elimination. The set was reduced to a bare minimum, lighting was calibrated to an almost unreal perfection, and the body emerged in all of its purest simplicity. Sieff made an aesthetic choice that was an important statement: he opted for the freedom of portraying beauty that transcended the aesthetic rules of those years. He continued to amaze us through images that were only apparently simple. In that decade of confusion, Jeanloup Sieff created a world of unity and harmony. He did not portray fashion the way it was or the way it should have been, but seemed to arrange elements in a new socio-sensual narrative. He never stopped taking pictures, though. Or pitching himself into the world. In 1986, he published two books, one of naked young women, one of a 1959 French miners strike – his anxieties often shaded his work with a desire to follow too many paths. He did campaigns for Patek Philippe watches. And he had one more moment in the sun of fame and fashionability. Most famously, most influentially, he was used in the early 1990s, to rebrand Häagen-Dazs ice cream with his sensuous – and smutless – nudes. Decades on, the atmosphere and imagery of those pictures is still resonant, still being used to sell us things.He received his first camera, a Photax, from his uncle when he was no older than 14 years old. “If I hadn’t received that camera, today I’d maybe be an actor, film maker, writer or gigolo.” He was published for the first time in 1950 in Photo Revue. Four years later he decided to work as a freelance photographer, but his work was never published. He finally worked with Elle for 3 years before resigning to work for Magnum which he also resigned from a year later. All aspects of photography interest me. I feel for the female body the same curiosity and the same love as for a landscape, a face or anything else which interests me. In any case, the nude is a form of landscape. There are no reasons for my photographs, nor any rules; all depends on the mood of the moment, on the mood of the model.’

He died, aged 66, of cancer, in his beloved Paris on September 20, 2000. ‘I don’t believe in God,’ he had written. ‘But women and trees are proof of his existence.’ He sums up his work this way: “There are no reasons for my photographs, nor any rules; all depends on the mood of the moment, on the mood of the model. “ On art …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”. The exhibition “Shadow Lines” unites 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.

Unlike the tyro triumvirate of Bailey, Duffy and Donovan, he had no class war to fight, no chips to oversalt his pictures. He made a world of fun, of play, putting photographs within photographs – pictures of himself even. These are images that know that they are images – and tell the viewer that. In a fashion magazine. His determined matter-of-factness about his work always had an air of disingenuousness about it. The impulse that led you to make an image is a thing that you cannot share with anyone, even if you explain it. What remains is a surface that will live its own life, that will belong to everybody. I accept that surface.” -Jeanloup Seiff Jeanloup SieffHe was, unsurprisingly, a great admirer of the Anglo-German photographer Bill Brandt and the French painter Pierre Bonnard – both also great poets of the female bottom. ‘For it is the most protected, the most secret part of the body, and retains a childish innocence long since lost by gaze or hands.’ OLIVIER ZAHM — He’s famous for his nudes. How did he get his models to be so confident in front of his lens? The great French photographer Jeanloup Sieff died on 20th September 2000 at the Laennec hospital in Paris. He was 66. SONIA SIEFF— He was neither a playboy nor secretive. He was just a good photographer with irresistible charm.

He joined the Magnum photographic agency in 1958, before his fashion forays, and was applauded covering the death of Pope Pius XII. He worked for them throughout Europe until he left for New York and started with Harpers Bazaar, immersing himself in the diametrically opposed world of fashion. Remember, his use of a wide angle lenses in fashion and celebrity portraiture was groundbreaking at the time. Jeanloup Sieff worked for four years as a freelance photographer. His work was never published. He got work for three years at Elle magazine. He resigned and joined Magnum, but resigned after a year. He returned to Paris to produce assignments for Vogue, Elle and Nova. Additionally, he did advertising and personal projects. His work was wide-ranging. He made portraits of notables like Catherine Deneuve (opening photo, bottom row, center image) and fellow French photographers Jacques Henri Lartigue and Robert Doisneau. Jacques Henri Lartigue, 1972 and Robert Doisneau, 1975 portraits by Jeanloup Sieff. Multi-genres Jeanloup Sieff Credit: Gamma Rapho via Getty Images-Philippe PACHE. Though his Vogue fashion shoots of fur-trimmed and pampered London in the 1960s are some of the most recognizable of the decade, Sieff also took countless opportunities to photograph dancers. Possibly his most important project is his chronicle of dancers who have appeared with the Paris Opera Ballet, including Rudolph Noureev, Carolyn Carlson, Claire Motte and Nina Vyroubova. If there is a typical Sieff model, she is a teenage dancer with gathered up hair, pictured at practice, flexed and craning. B&H – B&H is a world renowned supplier of all the gear photographers, videographers, and cinematographers need and want to create their very best work.

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OLIVIER ZAHM — Did your father also know the people around Saint Laurent — people like Betty Catroux, Loulou de la Falaise, Catherine Deneuve, and Charlotte Rampling?