"Fashion and Photography"
A selection of Work from the Private Collections of Jean-Charles de Castelbajac, Claude Deloffre, Yves Saint Laurent and Pierre Bergé, Lothar Schirmer
For 1999, Paris Photo has chosen to explore the relationship between “Fashion and Photography”. Just as in 1998 the Gilman collection offered a unique take on the theme of “Architecture and Photography”, so this year several private collectors, each in their own way a player in the fashion story, have been invited to reveal the photos that are most a part of their lives.
Over the years, without the constraints of thematic or didactic considerations, Jean-Charles de Castelbajac, Claude Deloffre and Lothar Schirmer have assembled many hundreds of photos. For the first time in France, visitors will be able to enter these three private worlds through a selection of photos that reveal the sensibilities and way of seeing of these well-known personalities.
The greatest names in photography have followed Yves Saint Laurent throughout the last four decades. Brought together in the Yves Saint Laurent-Pierre Bergé collection, these photos illustrate this designer’s towering influence on 20th-century fashion, and at the same time trace a concentrated history of fashion photography.
For Jean-Charles de Castelbajac, photography has been a 30-year private passion and at the same time a source of inspiration in his work, just like painting and nature. A man who is intensely curious about every mode of expression, Castelbajac was one of the first designers to fully incorporate photography into his garments. He is presenting four of his "photographic works" at Paris Photo, including the dress-painting "Marilyn", where the fragile portrait of the iconic star is imprinted on silk; and his "epistolary raincoat", whose transparent architecture reveals 1992 photos by William Klein. As a connoisseur of contemporary painting (Basquiat, Bechler, Barcello, Haring, Paladino), Castelbajac works with a number of artists and has formed friendships with many of them – Malcolm McLaren, Jean-Charles Blais, Louis Jammes, Robert Mapplethorpe (Castelbajac designed dresses for Mapplethorpe’s book on Lisa Lyons) and Bettina Rheims, who did her first fashion photography for him, compiled in a book Les contemporains.
With more than 300 pieces, the Castelbajac collection is as eclectic as the man himself, and just as focused on the human figure. The exhibition at Paris Photo brings together pieces from his collection by Lewis Carrol and Nan Goldin, William Klein and Elaine Constantine, Callahan and Natacha Lesueur, Diane Arbus and Vibeke Tandberg, a triptych by Bernard Printz and a cruciform detail of a padlocked church door, captured in all its monumentality by Andres Serrano. Some of the photos in this collection are particularly linked to the life of the couturier. For instance, there is a portrait by Mapplethorpe, and elegant triptych in black and white used to adorn a 1982 fashion show invitation. A Polaroid shot by William Wegman, Split Personality Chair, commissioned by the American edition of Harper’s Bazaar in 1992, shows Wegman’s favourite model, his dog Fay Ray, with two "My Funny Valentine" chairs designed by Castelbajac for Ligne Roset.
Claude Deloffre’s collection, begun in the 1970’s, reflects her fascination with the United States and the glamour aesthetics of American movies, a predilection she shares with her childhood friend Thierry Mugler, with whom she has worked on many projects. In 1972, at her Parisian gallery-bookstore Multitudes, Deloffre was one of the first to show photography. But it was in Los Angeles, where she was to spend more than 20 years, that she was finally able to more fully satisfy her obsession with this art form. As a partner in the Cirrus Gallery, she discovered an unsuspected iconographic gold mine in California. She worked with France’s Ministry of Foreign Affairs, for whom she mounted shows of work by French photographers at American universities; in Paris, she showed the production of young California photographers. Deloffre also collected Hollywood film shots, and bought, at public auction, a number of unknown photos whose importance she felt strongly about. A journalist, co-founder of City magazine and correspondent for numerous Los Angeles publications, Deloffre is the author of Fashion Fetish Fantasy, a book on Thierry Mugler published last year in the U.S. and the UK, soon to be available in France.
The Claude Deloffre collection boasts some 300 photos. Selections from it were used for a travelling exhibition that toured Japan in 1998-99. Its presentation at Paris Photo will allow visitors to see a number of pieces that today are considered landmarks in photography, from the 1930s to the latest production, including Dorothea Lange, Lisette Model, Araki, Stern, Bourke-White, Sutkus, Nancy Burson, Callahan, David Seidner, Jean-François Lesage, Giacomelli, Massimo Vitali and Duane Michals. Pride of place will be given to Weegee, one of Deloffre’s favourite artists, along with Brassaï (La Toilette, rue Quincampoix, 1932), Erwin Blumenfeld (Jeune Femme, 1935) and Kertész (The Famous Model, Kiki, 1927, and Trapeze Artists - N.Y., 1969). Tony Curtis and Jack Lemmon, that unforgettable twosome from Some Like It Hot, are reunited in front of Annie Leibovitz’s camera (1995) in a shoot for Vanity Fair magazine.
The Yves Saint Laurent and Pierre Bergé Collection
The greatest names in contemporary photography portray the fascinating Yves Saint Laurent.... not directly, but by way of his work. The designer achieved instant recognition with the debut of his first collection in 1958, when he was designated successor to Christian Dior. This was only the beginnning of his success. Three years later, in 1961, he decided to establish his own fashion house in association with Pierre Bergé. His creations have become emblematic. These photographs translate into their own language the essence of a style that remains inimitable. With Saint Laurent, Haute Couture has won a place among the arts of our time.
Richard Avedon, David Bailey, Horst P. Horst, Helmut Newton, Irving Penn, Peter Lindbergh, Duane Michals, Bettina Rheims, Bruce Weber and Jeanloup Sieff - from William Klein, who did a shot of Saint Laurent’s earliest work for the America edition of Vogue, to David Seidner in the 1990’s, Saint Laurent’s clothing has captivated the gaze of the most celebrated photographers. The record of these exceptional encounters has been gathered together in a book of homage to the designer, Yves Saint Laurent et la photographie de mode, published by Shirmer/Mosel in Germany and Albin Michel in France. These photos, with appearances by Catherine Deneuve, Audrey Hepburn, Twiggy and Charlotte Rampling, among others, are testament to Yves Saint Laurent’s immense influence on 20th-century fashion. But more than that, they also bear witness to his extraordinary rich creativity and serve as a striking history of contemporary fashion photography.
With its more than 400 works, Lothar Schirmer’s collection is indissolubly linked to the ardour for art that led him to found Schirmer/Mosel, one of Germany’s first publishing houses in fine arts and other coffee-table books (movies, fashion, music). It was when he was 19 old, in 1964, that he came upon the work of Cy Twombly and Joseph Beuys. Despite his very modest means, the young Lothar’s enthusiasm for this work and eventually his friendship with the two artists themselves (completely unknown at that time) led him to make his first acquisitions, buying installations among other things. Since 1974 his core concern in collecting has been photography. His taste mirrors the internationalist policy of his publishing house. August Sander, Bernd and Hilla Becher, Lothar Baumgartner, John Cage, Thomas Struth and Seidner are some of the almost 50 artists represented in the Schirmer collection, which comprises some major sets of work by Beuys and Cindy Sherman. Like the book list of his publishing house, Schirmer's collection transcends genres and generations. Among its 250 titles are monographs on Man Ray, Moholy-Nagy, Karl Blossfeldt, Henri Cartier-Bresson, Eugène Atget, Weegee, Walker Evans, Cecil Beaton, Peter Lindbergh, Helmut Newton, Pierre Molinier, Mapplethorpe, Jeff Wall, Andreas Gursky, Candida Höfer, Ellen von Unwerth, Wegman, Martine Franck, Axel Hütte and Struth.
Contemporary German photography and fashion-related photography in the broadest sense of the term are the two main themes that guided Paris Photo's selection of works from the Schirmer collection. The show will bring together the production of Struth (Zwillinge and Art Institute of Chicago II), Seidner, Gursky (Niagara Falls), Nick Knight, Jörg Sasse (5170-Flugzeug), Stefan Höller and Ines van Lamsweerde. This is a broad view of photography: alongside Horst Paul Horst's portrait of Twombly in his Roman palace, work by August Sander (Die Stamm-Mappe) and Cartier-Bresson will also be presented. Seidner is an American photographer who has worked with the most outstanding couturiers from the 1960s to the present, most notably Yves Saint Laurent, three of whose creations Seidner records in a mise en scène. There are also Knight's photos of star models Kirsten Owen and Tatjana Patitz for Martine Sitbon and Jil Sander, while Sherman challenges the concept of identity and its conventions in various "self-portraits".