Fashion Photography

About

Fashion photography grew up with the illustrated magazine. As printing improved in the early 20th century, titles such as Vogue and Harper's Bazaar began replacing drawings with photographs of new clothes. Adolph de Meyer and then, from the 1920s, Edward Steichen brought soft light and modernist polish to their pages. Horst P. Horst's Mainbocher Corset (1939), with its model seen from behind, shows how much drama light and pose alone could create.

After the Second World War Irving Penn posed models against plain backdrops, while Richard Avedon took them outdoors and set them in motion. Helmut Newton brought tension and eroticism to the 1970s. Peter Lindbergh's pared-back black-and-white pictures of the late 1980s helped define the supermodel era, and Herb Ritts sculpted bodies in hard California light. Because fashion photographers are free to stage, invent and exaggerate, the field has always overlapped with portraiture and art photography.