Archaeology of Elegance: Twenty Years of Fashion Photography - 1980-2000

Book Description
Over the last twenty years, fashion photography has emerged as one of culture's core mediums. archeology of elegance presents as "archaeological" view of the best fashion photography over the last two decades, unearthing the various attitudes and offering a unique perspective on fashion history.

Over two hundred images by sixty-two of the world's best photographers serve to visualize the qualities and forms of recent cultural foes, from the rebellious energy and poetry of punk and the post-modern and Modernist variants of 1980s glamor, to the high-tech and futurist aesthetic and the way in which fashion has increasingly become allied the fine art.

Ulf Poschardt believes that fashion photography has freed itself from the shackles of utility and can now lay claim to being a discrete art. This collection seems to bear his theory out: the medium has indeed become the message.


From the Inside Flap
Archeology of Elegance is an exceptional and dynamic collection of 200 superb photographs by sixty-two of today's most acclaimed photographers from Robert Mapplethorpe to Peter Lindbergh, Miles Aldridge, Herb Ritts, Ellen von Unwerth, Nick Knight, David Lachapelle and Jean-Baptiste Mondino, presenting fashion photography as art. During the past twenty years, there is no question that fashion photography has become a driving force for new directions in fashion, design and cosmetics and a vital source of ideas for the visual arts and design–manifesting itself in forms as diverse as punk rock, glamour or high-tech futurism. According to culture critic Ulf Poschardt, fashion photography has become the new, almost self-sufficient leitmedia of international culture, a culture that is expressed increasingly in visual terms. As seen in Archeology of Elegance, this once commercial and functional craft has become, without question, an art form in itself.

The book accompanies an exhibition in Paris and Hamburg with upcoming venues in New York, LA, Tokyo and London.

About the Author
Marion de Beaupre is the agent for photographers Jeanloup Sieff, Peter Lindbergh, Paolo Roversi, Ellen von Unwerth, and Thierry le Gous. In 1997 she opened Galerie 213 for contemporary photography in Paris.

Stephane Baumet has curated numerous photography exhibitions in France since 1993.

Ulf Poschardt is the creative director of the Welt am Sonntag newspaper. He teaches art theory as a visiting lecturer at the Berlin Academy of the Arts and is the author of four previous books.



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When perusing the pages of any fashion magazine, one inevitably comes across pictures that in no way pertain to the subject of, well, fashion. These are the art-house photos, the models sans clothing, the objets d'art placed just so in a spare room. And these are the photos that have made it into this collection. Touting itself as an homage to the last 20 years of fashion photography, this tome is more like a collection of the most avant-garde photos from some of the most famous fashion publications. Just because these works first appeared in the pages of Vogue, Interview, and the like doesn't mean that they should be automatically classified as fashion rather than art photography. Still, though Poschardt (art theory, Berlin Academy of Arts) works hard in the main introduction and section essays to convince us that the photos offer more than their surface value and that fashion photography is an art that will define and preserve the art of fashion, it is questionable whether such sentiments apply to this particular collection. The book accompanies an exhibition that will travel internationally, with stops in New York City and L.A. The result may be useful for larger art photo collections, but its high price makes it a marginal purchase.-Rachel Collins, "Library Journal" Copyright 2003 Reed Business Information.


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