Fashion Faces Up : Photographs and Essays from the World of Fashion

Category: Books,Arts & Photography,Photography & Video

Fashion Faces Up : Photographs and Essays from the World of Fashion Details

Excerpt. © Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved. Fashion Faces Up provides abundant evidence that leading photographers from many parts of the world have responded with great generosity to the request to donate their work to help an important cause. The principal aim of the project is, of course, to raise funds for Gilda's Club. But the nature of the request, in which the responsibility for the specific choice of images lay with the photographers, resulted in a unique visual anthology that has an added fascination for anyone interested in both photography and in fashion. Given that no single image could be expected to represent adequately the range of any artist, the final selections made by each photographer provides an intriguing insight into their aims and achievements. The heterogeneity of styles and approaches on display in this collection adds up to a compelling document of the genre, emphasising the endless variety of work that has stemmed from the many individual viewpoints. Most of the photographs are recent, and accumulate into an overview of contemporary ingenuity at the beginning of the new millennium. There are, though, exceptions to this, works by established masters who inspired and elevated the profession of fashion photography, ranging from Horst P Horst and Norman Parkinson to Richard Avedon, Jeanloup Sieff, and Helmut Newton. In i96o, Eve Arnold, in her informal yet insightful portrait of Marilyn Monroe, like Marvin Israel with his offbeat portrayal of Elvis Presley, found a new way of representing an iconic figure. Terry O'Neill captured Frank Sinatra in an early paparazzo-like image whose lineage extends through to Chris Moore's photograph of Yves St Laurent and Catherine Deneuve. Similarly, the essential modernity of Lillian Bassman's 1950 fashion study of Barbara Mullen was a key factor that has ensured her work maintains a contemporary relevance. Many remarkable young innovators have joined together here with these distinguished predecessors, and amply demonstrate the continuing impulse to break creative barriers in the medium of fashion and style photography. Martin Harrison Read more