Italian Eyes: Italian Fashion Photography from 1951 to Today

FROM THE PUBLISHER

Only recently has fashion photography been accurately seen as an important medium within contemporary visual culture: it has evolved from a mere supporting role of reproduction into a creator of icons and ideas, and a veritable form of art. Its power, in defining itself as a means of communication, is to record, or even determine today's lifestyle. Italian Eyes not only shines a much-deserved light on Italians who have made photographic history, but also highlights an Italian style that goes beyond fashion, thus offering a repertoire of images that reconstruct the changes in fashion and the evolution of society from the end of World War II to the present.

Italian Eyes presents the most important fashion magazines in the world and the advertising campaigns photographed for Italian and international designers—a sort of visual atlas of Italian evolution of fashion photography. Various chapters unfold with images accompanied by texts analyzing fashion photography according to different themes: portrait, narration, the fashion photo set, the evolution of masculine and feminine images, and others.

Some of the featured photographers include: Maria Vittoria Backhaus, Aldo Ballo, Giampaolo Barbieri, Gabriele Basilico, Manfredi Bellati, Roberto Calabrò, Roberto Carra, Giovanna Calvenzi, Sergio Caminata, Lorenzo Capellini, Alfa Castaldi, Elisabetta Catalano, Attilio Concari, Maria Vittoria Corradi, Barbara D'Alessandri, Gianni Della Valle, Aldo Fallai, Marina Fausti, Fabrizio Ferri, Franco Fontana, Angelo Frontoni, Andrea Gandini, Giovanni Gastel, Piero Gemelli, Arturo Ghergo, Helsa Haertter, Aldo Giuliani, Marco Glaviano, Renato Grignaschi, Guido Harari, Frank Horvat, Bob Krieger, Giorgio Lari, Bodi Leombruno, Ugo Mulas, Carlo Orsi, Stefania Paparelli, Federico Patellani, Emanuela Pavesi, Alberto Rizzo, Paolo Roversi, Franco Rubartelli, Ferdinando Scianna, Tazio Secchiaroli, Susanna Sinclair, Mario Sorrenti, Valerio Spada, Toni Thoribert, Alberta Tiburzi, Oliviero Toscani, and Fabio Zonta. Fashion Photography is everywhere. The fashion image is a metaimage that totally transcends its object (clothing design) and specific context (fashion magazine) and, as such, has its circumstance everywhere and its center nowhere. Flexibility, furtiveness, adaptability, mobility: the fashion image is not an imaginaire but an operational matrix. It becomes an icon, which deciphers the semiotic chaos characteristic of our times even as it contributes to and extends that chaos. -Olivier Zahm, Chick Clicks: Creativity and Commerce in Contemporary Fashion Photography Edited by Maria Luisa Frisa.