Guy Bourdin was born in Paris in 1928 and received his first photographic training whilst performing military service in Senegal in 1948–9. His photographs were first shown in Paris in 1952, the catalogue for which exhibition included an introduction by Man Ray, and he began working for French Vogue in 1954.

Inspired by Surrealism, and specifically the work of Man Ray, with whom he struck up a relationship, Bourdin rejected the descriptive roles of photography in favour of an exploration of the medium's capacity for the divergent. He broke with tradition in that he remained above all an artist and an inventor, somewhat in the manner of Man Ray. Along with certain American photographers, notably Edward Weston, Bourdin recognized a concern with formal perfection and extremely high finish that became his own objective, one perfectly adapted to the deceptive sophistication of fashion imagery, the terrain in which he developed his ideas for over thirty years.