English Texts
Manifesto
by MICHELE SERRA
Etymology reveals the soul of words. Elegant comes from the Latin “eligere”, to choose. Inelegant, therefore, is whoever doesn’t choose. Either because they aren’t capable, or because they want to hide their true nature from others. And so they entrust the way they behave and present themselves to others to outside influences such as current trends, mainstream opinion, and the commonplace.
In politics, for example, supreme inelegance is adapting to keep pace with the polls, to go with the flow. When you say “people want it” you are not saying the most important thing, which is what you want; what kind of person you are; what words you would use if you no longer had those that you keep saying, over and over again, just to please your audience. For this reason above all, politics has become the quintessential place of inelegance, equaling if not overcoming, in the easy street to consensus, the traditional language of complying with popular tastes, that is advertising. Which today, when compared to political language, is much more imaginative and varied. Meaning, much more elegant. The vulgarity of politics – hasty tweets, the use of foul language, the baseness of opinions passed off as being “in touch with the masses” – aims to make us believe that the distance between the people and the ruling class has been reduced. A few years ago a boorish politician, during a break in a talk show which, unfortunately, I was also participating in, told me with a prophetic grin: “I am rude because I represent rude voters.” I believe he wanted to give me a lesson on the true nature of democracy. I also believe that he feels triumphant, and with some good reason: his party today runs my country. It should be inferred that elegance, in politics and perhaps elsewhere, is a loser by nature, because personal choices, original ideas, nonabused words, are condemned to defeat. But there is a crack in the wall of inelegance. It is the dullness, the deep boredom that, in the long run, comes with these overused words. It will take time, but it will happen: an unexpected idea, well formulated, the result of the intimate and convinced choices of those who enunciate it, will rise among the shouts. It will not go unnoticed. Politics will begin to choose again. It will return elegant and seductive, something that it isn’t today. •
(Trad. Pat Quigley)
original text page 32
Bill Cunningham
by SUZY MENKES
“Thank you, child,” Bill Cunningham would say, as he politely refused my offer to share a taxi back from the New York shows. Instead, he set off on his bicycle, rain, shine or drizzling snow, wearing his signature blue worker’s jacket and cap. The man with a camera who captured history in his lens always called me “child” – even though I had known him half his 60 years as a photographer. He was the figure on a wonky bike, who snapped society mavens, quirky downtown figures and, best of all, sniffed out fashion trends on his favourite corner of 57th and Fifth Avenue. “I’ve never been a paparazzi,” Cunningham would say. Yet he managed to capture not only the famous - like a younger, thicker Karl Lagerfeld with Italian fashion legend Anna Piaggi. He also stitched together the ever-changing patchwork of society, catching a private glimpse of Jacqueline Kennedy Onassis or the old guard of upper-class America. Who was this slight man with a perpetual smile and ever-present camera? Cunningham, whose father worked for the post office and whose initial step towards fashion was as a milliner, remained humble. His studio in New York’s Carnegie Hall had a simple, single bed among racks of photographs. No television. A communal bathroom. Yet his work transcended fashion. The path he followed – or created – produced a lifetime body of work that marks history. Mark Bozek’s “The Times of Bill Cunningham” was selected for the 2018 New York Film Festival. The movie maker had exceptional insight of the photographer‘s character after sitting down with him for a brief recording back in 1994. “We were supposed to be there for about 10-minutes and three-and-a-half hours later we ran out of tape,” said Bozek. “When I pulled it from my basement the day he died in 2016, I hadn’t watched it for 25 years,” he continued. “But I decided it was going to be just him and me. He told his own story so passionately. “
That was a reference to the photographer’s move from sunshine to shadow as he talked openly about the scourge of AIDS. But Bill’s life was focused entirely on photography and on recording fashion and the swathe of people it involved. I cannot remember a time when his free spirit was not following fashion and making a reportage for the “New York Times”. No show was too small – nor too grand – for his attention. He was aroused by the unexpected: the return of men’s sartorial splendor; tailoring worn in vivid colours by millennials; the ever-changing street-style from baggy rocker outfits to streamlined sportswear. I remember the photographer talking with glee about New York designers’ casual modern clothes that trumped the haute couture grandeur of Paris at a 1973 event in Versailles.
He called it “the most exciting show I have ever seen”, recalling the contrast between French maestros – Yves Saint Laurent, Pierre Cardin, Emanuel Ungaro, Christian Dior, Hubert de Givenchy – pitted against the understated, casual, streamlined clothes sent out
by America’s Oscar de la Renta, Stephen Bur
rows, Halston, Bill Blass, Anne Klein. The finale had Liza Minelli blaring out “Bonjour Paris”, while African-American Stephen Burrows stunned the formal French audience. It was the first – but by no means the last – time that the photographer showed his open mind to class and colour. Cunningham was 87 when he died, having received the French Legion d’Honneur in 2008. He became an official staff member of the
“New York Times” after a truck crashed into his bike in 1994 – the job offered health insurance. Before that move, so late in his career, the photographer was stubbornly independent, using his visual notebook to mark the changes from the wild energy of nightclub Studio 54 in the 1970s and then introducing the concept of uptown and downtown dressing. Cunningham’s exceptional photographs are supposedly worth today over a million dollars. But he would not have been impressed by the numbers.
“Money is the cheapest thing,” he said. “Liberty and freedom are the most expensive.” •
text page 166
Glen Luchford
by BEATRICE ZAMPONI
“The only real crime in fashion is being boring, because life can be so boring already. People spend their days in the office, sitting in front of a screen; going out and maybe dressing up with many elaborate clothes is not necessarily frivolous, on the contrary it can be a way to communicate with others. The reason why people buy a bag of a certain brand is because that brand has managed to create an imaginary, a vision of itself; this is the fulcrum of our work.” Glen Luchford began working with images in the late 1980s, exploring the most significant underground trends, from skateboarders to acid house music. From the beginning, he used a spontaneous – at times diaristic – artistic language that was unconventional for the era. Then, in the 1990s, he took this informal approach and paired it with a more sophisticated cinematographic style via an elaborate technique. He is an attentive interpreter of contemporary society and, today, with the book “Anti Glossy: Fashion Photography Now” (Rizzoli International), he – along with thirty other photographers – talks about how fashion images (and their use) have changed since the arrival of social media and digital publication. “Anybody can take a good picture, but it’s having a point of view that really makes the difference. Personally as a young man I was very influenced by photojournalism, by the ability to capture a moment. I was hypnotized by Kennedy’s assassination’s photos, and how the photographer managed to get into this incredible private moment and take a picture that would remain in history. It was precisely the interest in instantaneity that led me to a much more natural way of working than the artifice of the 1980s.”
“Anti Glossy: Fashion Photography Now” talks about how fashion photography has progressively veered more toward reality with more “real” shots meant to make people relate to them. But hasn’t fashion always needed dreams? Like with your historic Prada campaigns inspired by films like “Blade Runner” or “The Shining”.
In those campaigns I introduced a narrative use of the light: no longer a single light source, as the fashion sets used to be at the time, but many and elaborate, in order to create depth, a movie-like atmosphere. In the same way that music is sampled, I have sampled stills from iconic movies, from Kubrick, Fellini, Pasolini and I combined them together. It was like rapping, only not with sounds but with images.
Even the recent advertising you’ve worked on for Gucci recreates fantastical worlds, with alien women from outer space or Noah’s ark.
Alessandro has an incredible imagination, the challenge is to follow him and enter into the suggestions that he proposes. He does not set limits to his imagination and works without rigidly following a theme, with him, you never know what will be the next step. To cover the new media’s needs, the set was truly huge: we are talking about real Hollywood productions of up to 150 people.
What has changed in the way you work?
Through social media you can control and guide your message, you can create a sort of a personal magazine of which you are the art director, deciding which images to show and how; this is an entirely new and very interesting possibility on a creative standpoint. The negative aspect of the advent of these new platforms has been the increase of work on the set. When I started, we would shoot twenty images each year to cover the advertising campaigns for all the seasons; today we shoot twenty a week. It’s been an exponential growth, along with the speed of realization required to publish part of the contents practically live.
The book highlights how you’ve always been open to new aesthetic models since the beginning of your career. The collaboration with painter Jenny Saville in 1995-1996 was emblematic of this. That was certainly not the stereotyped image of a woman.
I was commissioned by Vogue to take a portrait of her; when I arrived in her studio, she stood behind a glass, completely crushing and deforming her face as I shot her. That first meeting was so interesting that we began collaborating on a series where Jenny started from my photography as a basis for her painting. She had a completely unconventional view of the female forms and was not interested in the general vanity underlying the fashion pictures.
Today, millions of photographs are taken, but we print very few of them. A lot of them will be lost in the data shuffle…
I believe photography today has totally taken on an obsessive-compulsive disorder character. People shoot a thousand photos but never concern them, the photo is born and dies simultaneously. The images are then stored in a disk according to a strange mechanism linked solely to possession. Despite this, I am still convinced that photography is still alive and will go on with experimentation.
Online news today is all about brevity, with the top stories reduced to snippets on social media. Do you think narration and quality are on the way out?
I think of my son; I think it will be impossible for him to see a Bergman film because he will probably not be able to sustain the slow pace. Young people today absorb information at an exponential speed, their attention span is now calibrated on videos of a few seconds like those of Instagram. The prospect is therefore rather sad, but the price of evolution always presupposes renouncements. From all this speed, something revolutionary will certainly come out: we are unequivocally witnesses of the birth of a new era.