Today’s paparazzi shots of the Sixties icon Brigitte Bardot usually show her cuddling abandoned puppies or lecturing against French Muslims but this exhibition, marking her 75th birthday, pushes that reality aside and concentrates on the reasons for her lasting fame.

The time span (1958-81) sees the teenager with Picasso in 1956, smiling in 1965 as Paris milliner Jean Barthet, who discovered her, adjusts a straw hat in his salon; on film sets in France and London; and sunbathing topless in St Tropez with then husband Gunter Sachs. The evolving Bardot look also traces the parallel story of the paparazzi who constructed it.

Informal, intimate shots by Tazio Secchiaroli dominate the show. The street photographer who inspired Fellini’s character Paparrazo in La Dolce Vita led his “pack” (including Giancarlo Botti) on Lambrettas, to establish a cheeky approach to celebrity. The collection reveals sophisticated compositions and an artistry absent in today’s equivalents. Tazio photographed Bardot in Jean-Luc Godard’s Le Mépris, informal, intimate poses at a table editing Polaroids, a cigarette hanging from her lips; wrapped in a blanket facing a mirror, adjusting her black beehive wig.

Other news agencies follow her career and private life (shopping in Paris, arriving from planes on tarmac, greeted by fans and photographers, always posing and pouting), and on holiday in the Alps with her dogs she softens. Late Sixties studio sessions with Sam Levin are preserved in beautifully muted Kodachrome, classic “natural” pin-ups of the day.

But among the smiles and pouts is the reality of her attempted suicide (1960), after which she is caught leaving hospital in a white headscarf and shades. It’s offset by the portrait of her cuddling two-day-old Nicholas — whom she abandoned to his father and replaced with abandoned dogs.

The exhibition is a reminder of Bardot’s unforgettable beauty and natural sexiness and gives rise to the question: could she have resisted today’s pressures to defy ageing?

Until 3 October. Information: 020 7494 3857,
www.jameshymangallery.com