A few months ago, after returning home from a photography fair where I’d moved from booth to booth trying to keep my eyes from giving in to the numb, unseeing state that art fairs tend to spark, a photographic item in my post-box caught my attention: a catalogue.

It showcased the wares of a clothing brand targeting older women, with silk layers in varying shades of purple. I was not the intended recipient, and the images were so preoccupied with being tasteful that they were bland and unmoving. But it’s important to be conscious of the objects and mediums that are fading away around you, so I found myself spending a while with it, turning the pages, taking in the photographic language – the women leaning against doorframes in long pashminas, or sitting in chairs with one leg extended, showing the wide cut of trousers, while staring off into the middle distance.

Guy Bourdin only published one book in his lifetime, and it was actually a catalogue, not a book: a lingerie brochure, commissioned by Bloomingdales in 1976. The publication, titled Sighs and Whispers, is a strange little item. The images oscillate between an offbeat, slightly chilly mood – as if one is spying on half-dressed women through a keyhole – and a kind of all-out confrontational sensuality: two models stretching their limbs as if star jumping, while staring straight to camera, the harsh ring light adding to the starkness. They are clad in Donald Brooks’ Luxurious Quiana Nylon Collection: “so luxurious, you’d never know it’s practical.” It is one of various great publications, made exclusively for advertising brochure purposes – another favourite is William Klein for Citroën.

Sighs and Whispers caused controversy when released. In part this has to do with the vaguely edgy, 'kinky' nature of the images – 'farewell sweetness and apple pie' reads one newspaper review from the time – but mostly it’s to do with how that mood intersects with the intimacy of the format. The images were targeted straight into living rooms and bedrooms, sent to regular customers’ homes by mail or slotted into the Sunday New York Times. They arrived without prior notice, ready to be consumed intimately, by a viewer left one-on-one with the picture, rather than one idly walking past a communal billboard, on a busy street.

Fashion and fashion photography already have a more intimate connection with a viewer than most other forms of photography. This is in part because the images are nearly always about the body, and thus are viewed through the lens of comparison: could I, should I, look like that? The home is a central site for such anxiety: a place where we all get dressed each morning, piling clothes high on the bed as we discard look after look for being “not quite right” before declaring that we have nothing to wear. Any catalogue launches itself into this fraught space: Sighs and Whispers came like a bomb through the letter box, ready to disrupt. We often talk about why and who and what with images, but it’s rarer to talk about where. What impact does a viewing location have on our read of an image?

I thought of Sighs and Whispers as I looked at the newly arrived catalogue, struck by the odd and modern novelty of consuming a suite of unsolicited images within my own home, when not on a screen. The experience offered a similar awareness of the unrelenting passage of time to one I had recently when I came across a picture of a McDonald’s ashtray in the archives of my phone’s photo storage: a once normal object suddenly out of step with daily life, not so much obsolete as a relic, evidence of a time when things were done profoundly differently. In my short life, I’ve watched numerous pieces of technology related to the way we consume imagery become redundant or vaguely quaint. The physical photo album. The DVD player. Now, the catalogue seemed a dispatch from a nearly gone era: a pre-internet time when the fashion image was held in the hand or pinned to the wall.

Prophetically, Bourdin’s images play with all this. They toy with what we see: what is revealed how and where. All this comes back to lingerie, of course, which is tantalising because of a game of conceal and reveal: the glimpses, the flashes. The images extend this cat and mouse idea to the fashion image, to how it should be presented, consumed. In one image, the women are flanked by a large curtain. The effect is part domesticity – a standard bedroom window before nightfall – and part theatre stage, a scene that could end, be cut from view at any moment.

Undoubtedly the most curious and complex image in the story is one showing two women in printed floral Diane Von Furstenberg loungewear. We view the pair through a reflection in a wooden mirror hung in a room papered in similarly busy florals. Around the frame, three polaroids of other lingerie-clad women have been slotted, a detail that nods to the process of the fashion shoot – which requires various test or preparatory shots. The slotted polaroids also recall familiar bedrooms, familiar habits: cherished pictures of a lover, or a child, stored around the home, slipped into the corner of a frame, surrounding our own reflection as we make ourselves up. It’s a little joke from Bourdin: images within images (perhaps a topic for a later column). It’s about the slipperiness of images: caught in reflection, hazy, momentary. And the permanence too: the physicality, something tangible, an object within a domestic space, something to hold, to save, to have.

LOU STOPPARD is a London-based writer and curator. Her books include a survey of the work of street photographer Shirley Baker, published by Mack in 2019; Pools, an exploration of swimming in photography, published by Rizzoli in 2020; and Exteriors: Annie Ernaux and Photography, published by Mack in 2024, to time with an exhibition of the same name at MEP, Paris. She has written for The Financial Times, Aperture, The New York Times and The New Yorker. Her fiction has appeared in publications including Five Stories for Philip Guston, published by Printed Matter, Inc in 2024.