გამოფენები

Leafing through fashion magazines, a surprising image can sometimes catch our attention amid overly aseptic and standardized series. The photographer’s gaze – his narrative, his vision of the female body and fashion, or his often-pictorial references – catches the eye! Is this really another fashion photograph?  The challenge here, in fact this publication’s raison d’être, is to remove these images from the pages of magazines and publish them into a book. From the coffee table to the bookshelf… A major leap indeed, larger than might be imagined.  Books’ pages, with their different paper and thicker density, give them quite a different status; from an obligation to sell dream and garments to a different perspective.  Magazines’ captions, whose purpose is to inform the potential consumer, have vanished; these few lines in support of fashion are deliberately deleted in order to display only the image and the photographer’s vision. Removing them from their original context operates a shift in label – no doubt more “artistic”!  A narrative that reaches far beyond fashion, and that tells us of our contemporary world, of new aesthetics at play, and of novel ways to consider this world. The client-reader is often oblivious to this. And for these rare photographers, the pages of magazines then become a field for experimentations, open to a large audience, larger than that of a small, cold, “white cube” gallery. As if to smuggle art, as photographer Erwin Blumenfeld would say.    Beyond garments, the photographer thus exhibited reaches another land, the world of art, or an approximation of it. Also invited here are photographers who exhibit in galleries (or museums). When vertical photography meets magazines’ horizontal photography! Artists who master the codes of photography and appearance in their production and bring them away from fashion or assignments thus punctuate the pages of this book in an original face to face: is this a fashion photograph? Rather confusing. Fashion photography in museums, artists’ works in fashion magazines, everything is blurred. So what! Classifications no longer apply.  Today, Richard Avedon, Irving Penn or Helmut Newton, to name only these three “monsters,” have integrated the art market and the museum space, when they almost exclusively worked on commission for fashion or advertising. They paved the way for the younger generations presented here.   Here are thus twenty-eight visions, series for magazines, advertising assignments, but also more personal work. Most of them are recent series. Some are somewhat older, even 10 years older, but that is beside the point: their impact remains as innovative!