Jeanloup Sieff
[Photographer, b. 1930, Paris, d. 2001, Paris.]
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.
I am totally superficial, I know. But I believe superficiality can be very serious, a defense against the gravity of things, a manner of discretion.
I’m proud of the two adjectives superficial and frivolous.
All aspects of photography interest me and 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.
If I have caught myself struggling to remember, it was, if not a pretense, at least premature, in that I only ever used photography for my own pleasure—even if I then bewailed the vanished pleasure which my pictures brought back to me.
This moment has been, it has been precious, I felt it as precious and I made this image. This is what we are trying to say.
