Left: Guy Bourdin, 1977 © The Guy Bourdin Estate, 2003

Richard Stacey packed his flash bulb, styled his hair, clasped the latest fashion glossy to his chest and headed to the big smoke to take in this dramatic show.

Fashion photography: women love the chance to gawp at beautiful clothes they may one day be able to afford, men love the chance the stare at women wearing beautiful clothes, women too beautiful to exist.

It's all about seduction, selling a dream, building a world readers of fashion magazines can lust after. Until August 17, at the V&A, there's a chance to fuel your desires with a collection of work by innovative fashion photographer Guy Bourdin.

Bourdin worked for French Vogue for 30 years from the mid 1950s, but made his reputation in the 1970s and early 1980s with a series of shoots which sought to re-define fashion photography, to move from selling a product to selling an image.

Even if you haven't heard his name before you'll be familiar with his style. Either you've seen his pictures, or images by people mimicking him. Impossibly crisp, impeccably lit, painstakingly choreographed, every nuance building the fantasy.

Lips are red, skin is white, bodies are shown partial, prone, dislocated. In one picture two models walk past a shop display window, almost indistinguishable from the mannequins inside. In another there's no model at all, just a crime-scene chalk outline on the ground where she's been, killed for her handbag.

Right: Guy Bourdin, 1978 © The Guy Bourdin Estate, 2003

It's powerful, disturbing stuff. In one of the few images to show the whole body, a naked woman faces the camera, her face obscured by a gas mask.

Other pictures show women frozen in mock ecstasy, face down in grass, or with their heads lolled to one side as if hanging. Eyes are blurred or closed, it's often difficult to distinguish. Are they dolls or corpses?

One picture made me freeze. From one side, a bed with a naked woman lying down, though we can see only her legs. Behind the bed a television shows the upper half of a man as he lies down dying.

On the far right of the frame a door is open. Light shines through, a young boy is walking past the room, barely glancing in. Who is this boy? Is the woman on the bed dead or dying (as the television seems to imply)? Is it his mother?

Bourdin's eagerness to explore the dark side of fashion-lust undermines the accusations of misogyny. Yes, he objectifies women, but not in a celebratory way. Recurrent images of death are a reminder of how destructive desire can be.

Left: Guy Bourdin, 1983 © The Guy Bourdin Estate, 2003

The second half of the exhibition brings together a host of background material. There's a remarkable selection of previously unseen Polaroids, slides, and cinefilm which the organisers hope 'strip away the commercial context' of his finished work, allowing us to see him as an artist.

It's not that easy though. For Bourdin advertising wasn't just context, it's the obsession running through his art, the central metaphor.

In the second room there's a touching testimony to this in the form of a selection of Xeroxed pages from his notebooks. They're in French, but helpfully typed English translations are displayed alongside.

Most of the writings are fragments of poetry, lines such as 'Behind the sky is hidden, an angel weeping, over your carnal body, it's ethereal hands, cannot caress your breasts made of flesh.'

Behind the clinical perfection it's this intense honesty which makes the exhibition compelling. Creepy, but compelling.