Fanny, Montalivet, France, 2009.
Photograph by Jock Sturges
“No one picture is precisely true but in the aggregate a cumulative portrait begins to approximate the truth of the person depicted. In a complicated way, the truth also dwells in the spaces between the pictures. There is much there that fascinates. And the better I know a model the more I am able to discern whether or not any given picture is true to them. There, you see. I have used the words ‘true’ and ‘truth’ four times in just a few sentences. That’s my ambition. Not my IDEA of the truth, but the truth itself.”
- Jock Sturges, Seattle, April 2010
I wanted to do something different. I wanted to make photographs, not catalogue shots.
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Sam Haskins in the current issue of RUSSH.
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A couple of years back I wrote a story for RUSSH on female fashion photographers… I feel like I really only touched the tip of the iceberg on women behind the lens past and present who have shaped the visual language of fashion. Louise Dahl-Wolfe (1895-1989) is one such woman. A self-described “frustrated painter” she always credited her early art-school training in colour, form and composition for her success as a photographer. Working on American Harper’s Bazaar as a staff photographer under Carmel Snow, Dahl-Wolfe took post-war fashion photography out of the studio and onto exotic locations from poolside to the wild west, and lays claim to discovering a teenage Lauren Bacall. The National Museum of Women in the Arts in Washington D.C are running an exhibition, Fashion Forward: Photographs by Louise Dahl-Wolfe featuring 29 B&W photographs that range from humourous juxtapositions of human models with famous paintings and sculptures, to glamourous shots of fashions by design luminaries Cristobal Balenciaga, Christian Dior, Jacques Fath, and Claire McCardell.
Fashion Forward: Photographs by Louise Dahl-Wolfe, March 20, 2009 - August 30, 2009
Jeanloup Sieff was a practitioner of the photographic art of high fashion, and avowed a fidelity to the frivolous and superficial. His legacy places him in the top rank of fashion, portrait, and art photographers. via source
