Paying Respects To Guy, London

Day 363 of 365. Met up with a friend today to go and see the Guy Bourdin exhibition at Somerset House in London. I think he was an absolute genius as a photographer and today's image is of a hoarding at the entrance to the exhibition. I noticed quite a few people taking shots and in the strong winter sunshine they cast these amazing shadows.
The exhibition itself was superb and is so worth a visit if you have time to go and see it. Also, on at Somerset House was a free exhibition of images by Chris Stein, a band member of Blondie. His images were a revelation - wonderfully evocative of the Seventies and early Eighties in New York. Of course, he had Debbie Harry as a subject matter and the shots of her are brilliant. There was also a very melancholic undertone due to the fact that many of the people featured died when young and that the New York captured through his lenses disappeared so long ago.
After seeing those two wonderful exhibitions we decided to make it a triple whammy and go to see the Horst P. Horst show at the V & A. A totally different type of photographer but also fascinating to see his work. He often worked with a very cumbersome 10 x 8 studio camera and with exposures of 2 - 3 seconds and yet the images have a wonderful, sly, smooth beauty to them. I particularly loved the colour work - the prints reproduced from the original transparencies were wonderful. You could almost drown in the sumptious colour and dramatic shadows.
It was such an enjoyable day, the spell only broken by the rugby scrum at the underground station caused by "essential engineering works"!