Fashon photography

There are a great number of gifted masters of photography. I have the feeling that there are more photographers at work now than at any time in recent decades. As I look through different fashion magazines, like Vogue, Elle, and Harper’s Bazaar, where the names are highlighted and mentioned. Who do I see? Annie Leibovitz, Bruce Webber, Meisel Steven, Mario Testino, Anton Corbijn, and Peter Lindbergh, just to name a few. Each contemporary photographer has his own style, theme, voice, and each one found his niche in the world of fashion photography.



One of my all time favorite fashion photographers is Richard Avedon. He died in the year 2000. An exhibition was organized in his honor by the International Center of Photography with the cooperation of The Richard Avedon Foundation. I must say, his was some of the most exciting and challenging recent work in photography. This project critically examined fashion and its relationship to art and other cultural and social phenomena. Through the lens of fashion – in its broadest conception – I saw the proliferation of photo work exploring the uses of style, images, and personal presentation. The exhibition was devoted to his entire career. It included 175 photographs, including his early work which was all in black-and-white.









He is the most significant and influential photographer who has made fashion one of his subjects. Going through the exhibition rooms, observing and taking his images in slowly, was a photographer’s delight for me to explore such great art. He created images with a youthful, spirited, and distinct style. If I should critique any of his pictures, better to say devour his pictures, each one looked alive, airy, and easy to produce, as if he used a point-and-shoot camera. For sure, this was not the fall, it took more than a snapshot. He took models out of the studio and photographed them in motion to exhilarating effect.









During the first decade of the 20th century, Italian artists launched an art movement called Futurism. Balla Giacomo created a painting that would celebrate motion, speed, and energy. Perhaps Richard Avedon was inspired by these paintings and took it to the next level. Working in France, he evoked a vision of Paris around his couture collections and with his imaginative outdoor images he created the most glamorous pictures. Constantly, he was pushing his boundaries of what was acceptable in fashion photography. He was inventive and creative and reflected the mood of the moment through his work. His most memorable and exciting images are the ones of the models in motion. One practical image stayed with me; a young couple on roller-skates, she is holding his left arm with her hands, looking into his eyes, revealingly as they glide with a kind of easy motion across Place de al Concorde. A photographer always hopes to catch this “one moment” on film, but Avedon has more than just one moment.