Fashion photography is said to have begun with the distinguished American photographer Edward Steichen in 1911, and in the more than hundred years since then the genre has attracted some of the most talented photographers in the history of the medium. Many of them started their careers thanks to the editors and art directors of Vogue, Glamour and other Condé Nast publications. This book, featuring the work of 85 of the great fashion photographers past and present, drawn from the Condé Nast archives in New York, Paris and Milan, illustrates the early work of such celebrated practitioners as Cecil Beaton, Irving Penn, David Bailey, Helmut Newton, Corinne Day, Ellen von Unwerth and Mario Testino that appeared in the pages of the company’s magazines. The book is arranged chronologically from 1910 to 2010, and each plate section is interleaved with texts that recount the major photographers of the period and the changing styles of photography and fashion. The book also includes an interview with Franca
Whether they are of Abu Dhabi, California, Egypt or Emilia, all of the images he produces are lit with a constant physical light and elements that this photographer seems to always have with him the way he does with his camera bag, and through which all he wants to do is observe the world. I find such an aesthetic to be more that of a painter than a photographer somehow. Better yet, that of a post-documentary or neo-pictorialist photographer, who experiences and conceives his work to be the exprssive gesture of an artist for whom the subject is above all the opportunity for a tremendous but constant variation in his view of the world.
