Fashion Photography Gets Its Due in a New Show, “Icons of Style,” at the Getty https://www.vogue.com/article/icons-of-style-fashion-photography-show-getty

1. JUNE 25, 2018 11:10 PM
by LAIRD BORRELLI-PERSSON
RUNWAY
Fashion Photography Gets Its Due
in a New Show, “Icons of Style,”
at the Getty
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“Icons of Style: A Century of Fashion Photography”
George Hoyningen-Huene, Bathing Suits by Izod, Paris, 1930
Photo: © Horst, Richard and Allison Roeder / Courtesy The J. Paul Getty Museum
Bucking the trend for crowd-drawing monographic photography shows is “Icons of
Style: A Century of Fashion Photography,” at the J. Paul Getty Trust. It’s been more
than 40 years since such a survey was mounted in the USA. Why the gap? By way of
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3. explanation, curator Paul Martineau quotes Richard Avedon, who said: “Fashion is
the f-word, the dirtiest word in the eyes of the art world.” Fashion might like to court
art (see Dior x KAWS, Louis Vuitton x Jeff Koons), but in the rarefied world of
museums (which, to be fair, have limited acquisition funds), the commercial aspects
of fashion photography—and perhaps the fact that their main audience has
traditionally been women—have been seen as demerits, thus the genre is
underrepresented in many collections, the Getty’s being an exception.
As “Icons of Style” ably demonstrates, fashion photography is undeniably an art. It’s
one that permeates our everyday lives and sharpens our vision, it comments on
sociopolitical issues, and it has had a trickle-up effect on the fine arts. Included in the
show is Hiro’s Black Evening Dress in Flight, New York. Shot from above, it
captures a woman walking with billowing black “wings” of fabric flowing behind her.
Who would have guessed the photographer’s assignment was to shoot a shoe? “Hiro
wasn’t too happy about it,” Martineau explains. “He thought that that would make
for a very boring picture, so he came up with something much more interesting. He
studied with Alexey Brodovitch [famed art director and mentor to Irving Penn] and he
was told: ‘If you look through the viewfinder and you don’t see something you’ve
never seen before, don’t bother to click the shutter.’ ”
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4. Hiro, Black Evening Gown in Flight, New York, negative 1963; print 1994
Photo: © Hiro / The J. Paul Getty Museum
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5. The most recent pieces exhibited intentionally represent the work of influential mid-
career photographers (about whom Condé Nast’s Corporate Photography Director
Ivan Shaw contributed an essay for the catalog) rather than future stars. “Part of the
reason why I didn’t want to go past 2011 is because I think the younger people who
are working now don’t feel the same connection to this history and they aren’t
working in the same ways,” explains Martineau. “They don’t really want to be called
fashion photographers, they want to be called image-makers or something else; it’s
much more fluid and that’s definitely the result of the Internet and fashion blogging.”
Martineau’s survey covers the years 1911 through 2011 and its reach is long, including
the work of 160 photographers, many of them contributors to Vogue, including Baron
Adolf de Meyer, the magazine’s first staff photographer and subject of a recent one-
man show at the Met. But not all the talents have marquee names. “A goal of mine,”
says Martineau, “was to include great fashion photographers who haven’t been
celebrated or aren’t well-known to the general public.” Among the curator’s “finds”
are Kourken Pakchanian, a Vogue contributor whose photos captured the breezy
confidence of the 1970s American woman; Neal Barr, known for photographing
vintage fashions; the Chicago-based Victor Skrebneski; Willy Maywald, a German who
became the main photographer for the house of Dior; and Martha “Matsy” Wynn
Richards, who, the curator notes, “worked for Vogue in 1923 and is one of the first
female fashion photographers that I know of.” One happy, direct result of the Getty’s
casting a large net is that some of the lesser-known artists have recently been snapped
up by galleries.
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