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What a world! That would be the world of
Edward Steichen, the subject of a recent fashion retrospective
at the International Center of Photography. Subtitled In
High Fashion, The Conde Nast Years 1923-1937, the exhibition
of 175 of Steichen’s fashion photographs for Vogue and
Vanity Fair was a testament to a Jazz-era world of hedonism
and extravagance poised on the cusp of exhaustion. Sound
familiar? Oh, but while the party was raging, what a party it
was! A partial guest list of Steichen’s subjects conjures up an
entire world of madcap heiresses, playboys, literary luminaries,
and stars of stage and screen: Charlie Chaplin, Gloria Swanson,
Princess Youssoupoff, HL Mencken, Greta Garbo, Gary Cooper, Al
Jolson, WC Fields, Clara Bow, Jack Dempsey, Paul Robeson, Joan
Crawford and Douglas Fairbanks. More stars than in the heavens
as MGM used to proclaim. Steichen photographed them
at work and at play, on the SS Lurline to Hawaii,
backstage and in their dressing rooms, and on George Baher’s
yacht—and always impeccably dressed, and particularly the models
such as the stunning Lee Miller. To see these black-and-white
photographs anew—and some of them are so iconic as to have
entered the collective subconscious—is to realize again
Steichen’s influence on photographers such as Avedon,
Mapplethorpe, and Bruce Weber.
And then to move from the Steichen exhibition to an upstairs
anteroom off the first floor gallery where Vince Aletti had
curated a collection of photographs from the ICP archives was to
reconsider how interwoven and interdependent are the worlds of
fashion photography and photojournalism. Aletti collected
approximately seventy photographs from 1888 to the present,
including work from such disparate art photographers and
documentarians as Weegee, Lisette Model, Larry Clark, Bruce
Davidson, Walker Evans, Andrea Modica, Jacob Riis, Ben Shahn,
Ernest J. Bellocq, Leon Levinstein, Helen Levitt, Carrie Mae
Weems, Robert Capa, and Berenice Abbott—and in so doing revealed
the ways in which fashion, and its photographic representations,
consistently draw inspiration from multiple sources in the
quotidian world. To ask the question “What is a fashion
photograph?” is to ask “What is fashion?”—and as these
exhibitions attest, fashion is everywhere—when we open our eyes.
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