David Bailey | We’ll take Manhattan

Posted on 30/01/2012 by W&V

Recently filmmaker John McKay revisited David Bailey’s legendary 1962 trip to New York in the BBC film We’ll take Manhattan. During this trip Bailey had to shoot the photo’s for an editorial which was published in the April 1962 edition of British Vogue. He agreed to do the shoot only if the, at that time still unknown, Jean Shrimpton was his model. Bailey and Shrimpton where instructed to shoot mid-priced British fashions against the elegant landmarks and modern architectonic cityscape of Upper Manhattan. Instead of doing this David Bailey and his model Jean Shrimpton travelled with no hair or makeup artist and just his camera and an old teddy bear as prop through the more unpolished side of Manhattan. The shots he made melted raw and realistic street photography with fashion and high art and resulted in a legendary iconic series which captured the new liberated spirit of the decade.The photo’s of this shoot are later published in David Bailey: NYJSDB62 (Steidl, 2007). The film by John McKay explores the hedonistic love affair between the iconic photographer and the Sixties supermodel during this British Vogue fashion shoot.

Read more about David Bailey in this W&V blog post.

Photos by: David Bailey | David Bailey website | Photo 2 and 6 by: BBC | John McKay website

David Bailey | The 60s have never ended

Posted on 25/04/2011 by W&V

David Bailey is an inspiring, unique and remarkable photographer who shot fascinating fashion and celebrity photos. In 1959 he became a photographic assistant at the John French studio, and in May 1960, he was a photographer for John Cole’s Studio Five before being contracted as a fashion photographer for British Vogue magazine later that year. Along with Terence Donovan and Brian Duffy, he captured and helped create the ‘Swinging London’ of the 1960s: a culture of high fashion and celebrity chic. The three photographers socialised with actors, musicians and royalty, and found themselves elevated to celebrity status. Together, they were the first real celebrity photographers, named by Norman Parkinson as “the Black Trinity”.

Last year a retrospective of his most iconic photographs with the title “Pure sixties. Pure bailey” was on show at Bonhams. Fifty years on from a decade that changed our cultural history, his images celebrate a period of spontaneity and decadence, capturing the glamour and hedonism of the era. Among the famous faces immortalised by Bailey’s lens are Mick Jagger, Michael Caine and the Jean Shrimpton. In the below video interview he had an interesting talk with Sarfraz Manzoor about Picasso, body language and his dread of photographing modern celebrities.

Some of David Bailey’s photo’s are currently on exhibition at the NRW Forum Düsseldorf. This exhibition carries the title Zeitgeist & Glamour and will run until May 15, 2011. Read more about it in this article on the W&V Blog.

Photos by: David Bailey | Video by: The Guardian | David Bailey website

Inez van Lamsweerde and Vinoodh Matadin | Exhibition

Posted on 28/06/2010 by W&V

Currently the Foam Fotografiemuseum ( Photography museum) is presenting an exhibition of the stunning work by the photographic duo of Inez van Lamsweerde and Vinoodh Matadin. The exhibition is titled: Pretty Much Everything. It shows approximately 300 photographs spanning 25 years of the duo’s career. Art, fashion and portrait works all exist next to each other. By disregarding any chronological order the combinations of images are based on personal, formal, social, political and intuitive associations that show the way the artists have lived with the images for 25 years.

Inez van Lamsweerde en Vinoodh Matadin launched their international career with the publication of ten pages in the British magazine The Face in 1994. It was here that for the first time in a fashion series the models and the backgrounds were photographed separately and subsequently combined into a single image by use of a computer. The series typified van Lamsweerde and Matadin’s hyper-realistic style and was made to celebrate and subvert fashion within the context of a magazine.

Dubiousness is at the base of practically every image they make. Their work is ambiguous in every sense of the word and balances deliberately on the thin rope between fashion and art, perverting both worlds, mirroring the strangeness of everyday life through an extreme enlargement of a singular part.

Since each photograph demands its own dimensions, and some have been shown over the years and have their own existing size and frame style, the exhibition will have a dynamic flow and will read like a huge stream of images – forming one flowing, pulsating sentence rather than divisions that are grouped by size or subject. This showing will draw the viewer into Inez and Vinoodh’s world of constant dualism, duality and ambiguity, as well as their obsession with giving meaning to the surface, while oscillating between horror and beauty, the grotesque and the quiet, and the spiritual and the banal.

Pretty Much Everything is on view from the 25th of June untill September 2010 in Foam Fotografiemuseum, Amsterdam.

Photos Inez van Lamsweerde and Vinoodh Matadin | M/M (Paris) | source: Foam Fotografiemuseum

How You Look At It: a short fashion film by Poppy de Villeneuve

Posted on 02/06/2010 by W&V

“How You Look At It” is a short fashion film directed and created by Poppy de Villeneuve. The movie is an intriguing cross over and melting between cinema and online viral fashion advertising.
De Villeneuve is a British photographer based in New York. Her father is Justin de Villeneuve, the Sixties fashion photographer who discovered Twiggy, and her mother is the model Jan de Villeneuve. Poppy herself began modelling at the age of 17 but found it “boring” so took up photography instead. She studied at the London College of Printing, and since graduating has worked for publications including Vogue and Dazed & Confused. She also exhibits her work regularly.

Nowness on the film and its director:
“Summer in the city: a bustling, stifling and less-than-calming experience. But even in the midst of blaring car-horns, sweltering commuters and dizzying throngs of irritable pedestrians, there’s a pocket of peace to be found in every metropolis. Such moments of sweet escape provide the inspiration for the How You Look At It film.”

“Poppy de Villeneuve (who has shot for Vogue, Jalouse and Nylon, among others) and starring rising Chinese fashion model Liu Wen, who was recently signed as the first Asian face of Estee Lauder. To create her moment of blissful cool, De Villeneuve took to the serene spaces of New York’s Asser Levy Recreation Center—a turn-of-the-century bath house, replete with Art Deco pool—where, in a heat-induced reverie, a Norma Kamali clad Wen is joined by former Sopranos regular and actor in the Martin Scorcese-produced HBO series Boardwalk Empire Edoardo Ballerini, for a sensual, teasingly ambiguous swimming lesson.”

Video: Poppy de Villeneuve | backstage photos by fashion blogger Hanneli | source: Nowness/luxury group LVMH

Christopher Coppers reinterprets (fashion-)magazines

Posted on 28/05/2010 by W&V

Christopher Coppers is a Belgian artist who is based in Brussels. His current work consists, for a large part, of interventions, either with, within or on magazines. Construction and deconstruction are important key elements in his art. He has by now used many different magazines as his medium, for the most fashion related ones. Some examples are: Elle, Vogue, BEople, Playboy,View magazine, Vanity Fair and ID fashion magazine.
He Combines his love for printed matter with an obvious urge for creative distortion or destruction. Christopher extremely careful and diligent revisits these magazines, he dramatically reinterprets the original covers by intricately carving them and so transforming them into sculptures. By doing this he gives them a second purpose, a second life.