For nearly a century, fashion magazines have provided sophisticated platforms for cutting- edge photography - work that challenges conventions and often reaches far beyond fashion itself. In this book, acclaimed photography critic Vince Aletti has selected 100 significant magazine issues from his expansive personal archive, revealing images by photographers rarely seen outside their original context. With his characteristic élan and featuring stunning images, Aletti has created a fresh, idiosyncratic, and previously unexplored angle on the history of photography.
In 1973, Vince Aletti became the first person to write about the emerging disco scene. His engagement with disco nightlife continued throughout the decade as he wrote his weekly column for Record World magazine, which incorporated top ten playlists from DJs across the US (such as Larry Levan, Larry Sanders, Walter Gibbons, Tee Scott and Nicky Siano) alongside Aletti's own writings and interviews.
As disco grew from an underground secret to a billion-dollar industry, Aletti was there to document it, and The Disco Files is his personal memoir of those days, containing everything he wrote on the subject (most of it between 1974 and1978) augmented with photography by Peter Hujar and Toby Old. This book is the definitive and essential chronicle of disco, true from-the-trenches reporting that details, week by week, the evolution of the clubs, the DJs, and above all, the music, through magazine articles, beautiful photographs, hundreds of club charts and thousands of record reviews.
Photocopies of Aletti's Record World columns circulated for years among DJs and music lovers, until they were finally collected in 2009 into the first edition of The Disco Files, an instant classic that quickly sold out. This new edition of The Disco Files brings Aletti's compulsively readable disco writing back into print, adding an interview with Fran Lebowitz originally published in the Village Voice in 1990.
Throughout his career, curator, writer and critic Vince Aletti (born 1945) has been at the forefront of music, culture and the arts. He wrote for Record World and Rolling Stone and covered the club scene in the late 1970s and 1980s for the Village Voice, where he would serve as art editor until 2005. In addition to curating numerous photography exhibitions, Aletti writes about photography for the New Yorker
Lisa Fonssagrives-Penn (1911-1992) fut danseuse, photographe, styliste et sculptrice mais surtout l'un des mannequins les plus emblématiques de l'univers de la mode du XXème siècle.
Elle travailla avec les plus grands photographes de mode de son époque de 1935 à 1955 : Richard Avedon, Erwin Blumenfeld, Louise Dahl-Wolfe, Fernand Fonssagrives, Toni Frissel, Horst P. Horst dont elle fut la mannequin favorite, George Hoyningen-Huene, Frances Mclaughlin-Gill, Irving Penn, Georges Platt-Lynes, John Rowlings, etc.
Elle sera la première mannequin à faire la couverture du magazine Time en septembre 1949.
Épouse d'Irving Penn de 1950 jusqu'à sa disparition en 1992, elle fut selon Alexander Liberman, directeur artistique du magazine Vogue, le sujet de ses plus grandes photographies.
L'exposition à la MEP présentera environ 150 tirages originaux d'époque, issus de sa collection personnelle.
Certaines de ces images ont été publiées dans Vogue France, Vogue US ou Harper's Bazaar et beaucoup sont inédites, dont un grand nombre de photos de Fernand Fonssagrives son premier mari, et des portraits plus privées réalisés par Irving Penn.
Une collection intime et étonnante, dont la plupart des tirages sont révélés au grand public pour la première fois.
Reassessing the career of the hugely influential Harper's Bazaar art director, who changed the course of twentieth-century American photography and graphic design
This lavishly illustrated volume explores the influence and significance of the Russian-born photographer, designer, and instructor Alexey Brodovitch (1898-1971), best known for his art directorship of the American fashion magazine Harper's Bazaar between 1934 and 1958, as well as his tutelage of many celebrated documentary and fashion photographers, including Irving Penn, Richard Avedon, Eve Arnold, and Lillian Bassman. Though disparate in their aesthetic approaches, these figures are unified by their responses to Brodovitch's dictum to «astonish me.» The authors address Brodovitch's impact on photography as an artistic medium in the mid-twentieth century and explore how European art and design became the foundation of a new American print culture. Brodovitch's own work will be illuminated through his personal projects-such as the magazine Portfolio and the photographic project Ballet, which depicted performances of the Ballets Russes de Monte Carlo in the United States (whose evolution echoed Brodovitch's own émigré condition). Case studies of his transformative collaborations with photographers such as Arnold, Avedon, Penn, Lisette Model, Henri Cartier-Bresson, Hans Namuth, and André Kertész reveal pivotal encounters that may surprise even the most ardent photography aficionado. An illustrated chronology offers an important tool for scholars on this influential but often overlooked figure.
Distributed for the Barnes Foundation
Exhibition Schedule:
Barnes Foundation, Philadelphia
(March 3-May 19, 2024)
