Romantic, glamorous, seedy, libertarian, sexy, steeped in history, rich in art and iconic architecture, Paris inhabited the twentieth century’s bohemian imagination like no other. It was the birthplace of couture and Prêt a Porter, home of Givenchy, Christian Dior and his protégé Yves Saint Laurent.

Paris was the natural home for photographers who splashed in the fashionistas’ wake. Fashion, Paris and photography formed an inseparable bond for most of the last century. But it was also the nursery of the surrealists, delighting in anxious clashes of objects and ideas, which in turn influenced many of the men and women toting cameras.

The godfather of porno chic, perhaps the greatest fashion photographer of all, Helmut Newton, moved to Paris in 1961. He arrived via a circuitous route, first fleeing Berlin as a Jew before spending time in Singapore, Melbourne, America and the UK.

In 1952 he was American Vogue’s first contracted photographer. Unfortunately, he followed this with an unspectacular stint in London at British Vogue. Newton found the not-quite-yet swinging atmosphere in London constricting. One editor reportedly admonished him after a street shoot, prissily saying, “Ladies, Helmut, do not lean against lampposts.”

In France’s capital he found his true visual home, almost at once securing work at Paris Vogue. Here he immersed himself in a radically different creative landscape to London and in it he found his artistic liberation. He was given a free rein. Far from simply leaning ladies against lampposts, he placed them naked in stilettos on the Metro, in cup-less bras and leather jackets in front of the Eiffel Tower, or cross-dressed them in whip sharp Yves Saint Laurent evening suits, smoking cigarettes in cobbled backstreets.

His images were powerful, daring and alluring; his favourite models were as strapping and bold as the Eiffel Tower itself. These were not models but man-eaters, behemoths not butterflies. Newton’s was not the bland fashion photography peopled by beautiful clotheshorses that preceded it, instead the worrying and erotic creatures from a surrealist’s lucid dream inhabited his images. JG Ballard described Newton’s favourite models as being: “a new race of urban beings, living on a new human frontier.”

Another photographer whom Paris Vogue gave editorial carte blanche to was the native Parisian Guy Bourdin. Like Newton, he revelled in twisted surrealistic conjunctions. In Chapeaux-Choc (Hat Shocker ) for Paris Vogue, 1955, a mannequin like model shows off her white, wide brimmed Claude Saint-Cyr hat in front of a French butcher’s display of ghostly calves heads. Its disruption of the traditional fashion image still shocks today; a nightmarish take on Hepburn’s beauty aesthetic combined with all the utilitarian horror of the abattoir.

By 1967, Bourdin had mostly replaced his shock tactics with equally warped and mysterious narratives, creating claustrophobic B-movie tableaux for Paris shoe designer Charles Jourdan, who became his patron for the next 14 years. In these startling images, created for Jourdan’s adverts, legs become furniture or disembodied, roaming streets sans bodies. Heels threaten to grind a gun wielding hand into the pavement outside a porno cinema, electric sockets bleed and we are witness to the moment after a strange, un-identified crime.

It is no surprise that the disjointed aesthetic that became the language of fashion photography should have been so closely linked with this city. If Paris was the place around which these worlds’ span, its fulcrum was Man Ray. Not only was he central to several of the century’s most important avant-garde movements (including Dada and Surrealism) but he had also sporadically worked as a fashion photographer in the 1920s and 30s. When Bourdin needed a mentor, he knocked on Man Ray’s door – gaining entrance after displaying typical persistence.

Bourdin wasn’t the only great photographer to seek out Man Ray’s mentorship. Lee Miller, perhaps one of the best photographers America ever produced, moved to Paris in 1929 and became his student and lover. She had been a successful model, and was now moving to the other side of the camera. A striking woman with a peripatetic eye; her subjects became fashion, war and street life. She and Man Ray invented the technique of Solarization together (dubbing the silvery images “Rayograms”). She ballsily returned to Paris as Conde Nast’s war photographer, recording its liberation from occupation.

Notably, Man Ray was inspired by the photographer who made the most thorough recording of pre-war Paris, Eugène Atget. Atget was an unassuming and pragmatic man, who upon failing in his first career as a painter, set about capturing the city’s great monuments and architecture to sell to out-of-town artists for use as reference material. He inadvertently created one of the most beautiful and thorough collections of images of any city at that time, his gimlet eye illuminating the city through the passage of time.

When Man Ray published some of his pictures in 1926, Atget begged him not to use his name, perhaps believing himself a mere artisan who did not belong in such elevated artistic circles. But the truth is that he did belong. He was the recorder of Paris at its most naked, and Paris was at the root of it all – modern art, fashion and photography.

Thanks to Andrew Hansen at Prestel Publishing and Inca Waddell at Phaidon Press.