Jeanloup Sieff (Paris, 1933-2000) was a French photographer. His work has been recognized for his portraits of celebrities from the entertainment world and politicians, but also for his reports and landscape photographs. and nudes.

He was born in Paris on November 30, 1933 to parents of Polish origin. His studies after high school were brief: he studied Letters for two weeks, Journalism for ten days, Photography at the Ecole Vaugirard in France for a month and then in Vevey Switzerland for seven months. His fondness for photography made him start as an "amateur" photographer at the age of fifteen, gradually raising his photographic quality to debut as a photojournalist in 1954. A year later he joined Elle magazine, where he first made reports and later photographed fashion until he left the magazine in 1959. That year he began working for Réalités and Le Jardin des Modes. He also leaves the Magnum agency to work on his own. He received the Niépce prize in 1959, dedicated to rewarding photographic excellence.

In 1961, he settled in New York, where he collaborated with Look, Esquire, and mainly Harper's Bazaar. He spent brief stays in Europe where he did work for Twen, Vogue and Queen. In 1967, she decided to move to Paris, where she worked for Vogue, Femme, Nova, and other publications. He exhibited nationally and internationally and several of his works were acquired by different museums around the world. Thus, in 1971 he received the gold medal from the Skopje Museum of Modern Art and that same year he made a donation of several collections to the National Library of Paris, which in those years did not have funds to buy photographs by French authors.

The most outstanding characteristic of his work is the use of black and white, photographic shots mainly with wide angle and his dramatic contrasts in the laboratory. His style shows the influence of surrealism and the new objectivity. His work has been awarded internationally from Japan to the United States and is distributed in different parts of the world.

He died of cancer at age 67, on September 20, 2000 in Paris.

(Source Wikipedia)

Access the Jeanloup Sieff website

A good portrait is the relationship established between two people, there has to be someone in front of the camera and someone behind.