The Photographers Who Taught Us How to Want

Every serious photography student learns the technical lineage of this craft. Almost none of them are taught its actual genealogy, which is not a lineage of cameras and lenses but a lineage of desire — a small number of photographers, working across seventy years, who taught an entire century how to look at clothes and, without quite noticing the substitution, how to look at wanting itself.

It begins, properly, in the 1950s, with two men who could not have disagreed more about what a fashion photograph should do. Richard Avedon, shooting for Harper's Bazaar, refused stillness entirely — his models ran, laughed, were caught mid-leap in the rain, because he had decided that a garment's truth was revealed in motion, not in the studio's careful silence. Irving Penn, working the same decade for Vogue, argued the opposite case with equal conviction: place the garment against a bare grey backdrop, remove every distraction, and let the cut and the light do work that no gesture could improve. Between Avedon's kinetic energy and Penn's cool architecture, fashion photography acquired, almost immediately, both of the poles it would spend the rest of the century oscillating between.

By the 1970s the discipline had grown teeth. Helmut Newton photographed women as though they held all the power in the room, which in his frames they generally did — tall, cold, faintly dangerous, dressed for a confrontation rather than an occasion. Guy Bourdin, working for the same house of Vogue Paris and, unforgettably, for the shoe brand Charles Jourdan, pushed the image further still, into something closer to a crime scene lit like a dream. Neither man was interested in flattering the reader. Both understood, correctly, that desire responds far more reliably to unease than to comfort.

It is impossible to write honestly about this history without writing about the designers whose work gave these photographers something worth being seduced by in the first place. The precision of a Valentino gown, the dry, almost ascetic elegance Giorgio Armani built entire collections around, and then — arriving like weather — the operatic, occasionally violent creativity of Alexander McQueen and John Galliano in the 1990s: a photographer with nothing extraordinary in front of the lens produces, at best, a competent photograph. Every image I have named so far was made possible by a garment equally worth the attention.

The image-making itself found its two defining custodians in the same generation of editors. Franca Sozzani took the helm of Vogue Italia in 1988 and held it for nearly thirty years, until her death in 2016, using the magazine's relative distance from the advertising pressures of New York and Paris to permit photography no other Vogue would risk. It was Sozzani who gave Steven Meisel the run of nearly every cover and every major editorial for over two decades — an arrangement almost without precedent in magazine publishing — and it was in that partnership that Meisel, working obsessively with Linda Evangelista as his most fluent instrument, produced the images against which an entire era of fashion photography still measures itself. His other collaboration from the same period, Madonna's Sex in 1992, remains one of the few fashion-adjacent photographic objects to have altered the culture outside of fashion entirely.

Across the Channel, at Vogue Paris, Carine Roitfeld ran a parallel and equally decisive court from 2001 to 2011, renaming the magazine and reopening it to the grand houses — Balenciaga, Givenchy — whose historic weight she believed the title had drifted away from. Roitfeld and Sozzani rarely receive equal credit in the popular account of this period, which tends to remember only the photographers, but neither Meisel's nor his contemporaries' most consequential work would have found its page without an editor deciding, issue after issue, to protect a photographer's difficult idea from the compromises a magazine ordinarily demands.

The line does not end with that generation. Sølve Sundsbø, Norwegian by birth and London-based for most of his career, represents something like its most recent serious argument: a photographer who treats the darkroom's oldest tricks and a 3-D scanner as belonging to the same continuous toolbox, refusing the false choice between reverence for the medium's history and hunger for what comes next. Watching his work, I find it hard not to think of Avedon and Penn's original argument — motion against stillness — quietly resolved into something neither of them could have anticipated needing.

I return to this history often, not out of nostalgia, but because I think it is the only reliable education in what this discipline is actually for. It was never simply about clothes. It has always been about training an eye — the photographer's first, then everyone else's — to want correctly.

— Giulia

Bibliography

• Richard Avedon, Evidence: 1944–1994, Random House, 1994.
• Irving Penn, Passage: A Work Record, Alfred A. Knopf, 1991.
• Helmut Newton, SUMO, Taschen, 1999.
• Guy Bourdin, Guy Bourdin, ed. Alison M. Gingeras, Phaidon, 2006.
• Peter Lindbergh, A Different Vision on Fashion Photography, Taschen, 2016.
• Steven Meisel and Linda Evangelista, Linda Evangelista Photographed by Steven Meisel, Phaidon, 2023.