The Economist
Oct. 3rd 2024
By Rachel Lloyd
Fashion photography is in vouge
Museums and collectors now want what were once panned as commercial images for their walls.
Elton John had just finished a stint in rehab. Without the fog induced by drink and drugs, he found he was able to look at the world with "clear eyes". So when David Fahey, a gallerist, showed him work by three fashion photographers - Horst P. Horst, Irving Penn, and Herb Ritts - the musician was transfixed. It marked the start of what would become one of the world's largest private photography collections. More than 30 years later, Sir Elton has amassed more than 7,000 images.
Given his passion began with fashion photography, so does “Fragile Beauty”, an exhibition of selections from Sir Elton’s collections, on display at the Victoria and Albert Museum in London until January. A recent show at the Saatchi Gallery, “Beyond Fashion”, showcased the artistry and experimentation of the genre in recent decades. Elsewhere museums have focused on the oeuvres of single artists: this year alone there have been shows dedicated to the work of Penn, who died in 2009, as well as several contemporary photographers. An exhibition looking at the pioneering aesthetic of Deborah Turbeville, a fashion editor who became a photographer, opens on October 9th at the Photographers’ Gallery in London.
The art world is firmly fashion-forward. Exhibitions about designers have drawn hundreds of thousands of visitors. Artists including Tracey Emin, Damien Hirst, and Yayoi Kusama have collaborated with fashion brands; the Louvre, the Met, and Tate Modern have all hosted catwalk shows or industry events. More attention is being paid to the talent involved in making beautiful things, and so fashion photography – a form which was once disparaged as crass and commercial – is now being celebrated for its creativity.
The genre is appealing to collectors’ as well as curators’ tastes. “The market for fashion photography is thriving,” says Emily Bierman, head of photography at Sotheby’s, an auction house. “High art and high fashion absolutely meet and have become very coveted and collected.”
Three living fashion photographers, Markus Klinko, Juergen Teller and Paolo Roversi, are among the top photographers seeing the most growth in interest on Artsy, an online art marketplace; year-on-year, inquiries about their work are up between two and tree times. For a large print of one of Mr. Klinko’s pictures of David Bowie with a wolf, originally taken for GQ, you can expect to pay more than $300,000.
Often fashion photography deals in a kind of fantasy: few, after all, stand next to a wolf or get to pose with pachyderms in a Dior gown. “It is about creating a fictional world,” Nathalie Herschdorfer, the curator of the Saatchi show, says, “where people can dream and escape.” The impulse to gaze on something bewitchingly beautiful is an enduring one, but it is particularly acute in times of turbulence. Fashion photography jolts the viewer out of the grim and the quotidian.
Like other works of art, the images can transport you into the past. Clothes reflect the mood of the time, be it jazz-age ebullience or hippyish liberation. An image by William Klein, part of Sir Elton’s collection, features clothing and accessories inspired by astronauts: it was taken in 1965, when the cold war was raging and fascination with space was nearly universal. Contemporary work offers similar insights. Mr. Klinko, who has photographed the likes of Beyoncé and Kim Kardashian, says he thinks of himself as a “documentarian of pop culture”. His work is often suffused with allusions to mythology as a way of exploring how “Society is worshipping celebrity almost like a religion.”
In the current digital age, people are constantly bombarded with images; anyone with a smartphone can fancy themselves a photographer. Yet rather than dulling interest in fashion photography, social media has heightened it, as they underscore the inventiveness of artists. Few, for instance, could recreate Horst’s dramatic compositions with corsets and skirts or Melvin Sokolsky’s “Bubble” series for Harper’s Bazaar, which required a crane to hoist the model into the air. Fashions may come and go, but the greatest fashion photographers stand the test of time.