Jeanloup Sieff

A lot to learn from this 20th century photographer

Certainly not everyone’s cup of tea, Sieff (born 1933) produced an immense body of work throughout the 20th century. I know he produced work throughout the 1990’s until his death in 2000. To this day there are collections of his work published in new books and exhibitions. It’s interesting to me that he’s not one of those household names for photographers… I personally discovered him in the late ‘80s or early ‘90’s and immediately started studying his work.

I think what spurred my interest which continues until now is how much I can and do still learn from his use of space, he’s a master of wide angle composition. Through accident of poverty or unconscious visual sense I’ve gravitated towards wider, closer views and Sieff is one of the masters. His wide angle work is amazing, the compositions are clean, precise, with no wasted space. Sometimes they feel somehow natural where the perspective doesn’t immediately scream wide angle, in other cases they feel surreal. Either way they still have this hallmark of simplicity and lack of clutter given how wide the view is.

No matter if you struggle with wide angle composition or you are well on your way to mastering those perspectives he’s definitely one of those photographers well worth studying. What’s more amazing to me is that his commercial work is infused with the same perspectives as his fine art work. You will certainly find some more pedestrian point of views in his commercial work (as with many masters of photography) but by and large his unique visual sense is the most represented. What’s equally or maybe even especially interesting is that he continued to be black and white photographer well into the 80’s and 90’s until he passed away atypical of many of his peers in the commercial world.

The big questions is where to start. I own what’s probably the most popular and easily obtainable anthology; Jeanloup Sieff: 40 Years of Photography published in the mid-1990’s. The pricing for those is all over the map for used and new copies. I assume it’s out of publication. The google image search is not a great introduction to his work, you’ll probably have to dig a little deeper but it will be well worth the effort.

The latest publication I know of is available via YSL.com of all places. It’s priced reasonably given the outlet. You’ll definitely want to checkout his own website that’s maintained by what I assume is a collection of French and international photography foundations. You may need google translate but their is an extensive list of publications there that is a far better resource than plain old google and amazon.

In the age of the internet one expects that a comprehensive overview of a photographer’s work would be instantly available via google, instagram, and elsewhere. This is not the case for this amazing artists. Maybe it’s better that way. I love photography in print (as if that’s not clear), being forced to spend a little time finding and acquiring photographs in print form isn’t a bad thing. Sieff was definitely more appreciated in Europe and Japan. I stumbled upon him quite by accident. You may enjoy a treasure hunt that isn’t instantly satisfied sitting in front of the computer.

Workshop updates

All of our 2026 workshops are filled. We do have a couple of openings still available for our 2027 Portfolio workshop. More information and registration is at Les’ web site. March is a bit busy for us as Les will be returning this week and we’re going to be slammed with some work that piled up while he was away and two workshops to host but we’ll take a look at opening up some more workshops ASAP.

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