The weather has cooled down in London but here are some hot images to heat us up. These are the latest shots of Victoria and David Beckham for Emporio Armani, photographed by Mert Alas and Marcus Piggot. This season brings a Japanese influence in Victoria’s hairstyles, mixed with oiled bodies and symbolic rope for lots of sexual tension between the famed couple.
Mert Alas and Marcus Piggot, Turkish and Welsh photographers, met in England in 1994 and became a creative tour de force. They have merged high-glamour, colour and sometimes dynamic landscapes with a fair amount of image manipulation to create amazing images in fashion, portraiture and advertising. They always seem to get something new out of models and actresses (as shown in the hot-off-the-press images of Cameron Diaz for V Magazine, below) and create unconventional images.
PORTRAITURE
FASHION
ADVERTISING
Following on our previous post about the work of Inez van Lamsweerde and Vinoodh Matadin and in particular their work for Yves Saint Laurent’s Manifesto series, here is AW 2009, featuring the fabulous Christy Turlington. Christy was one of my favourites of the original supermodels and it’s great to see her still looking amazing.
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Since September 2007, alongside their main ad campaigns, Louis Vuitton have been running a series of images under their ‘Core Values‘ campaign. Featuring such luminaries as Mikhail Gorbachev, Catherine Deneuve, Andre Agassi and Steffi Graf, Sean Connery, Francis Ford Coppola together with his daughter Sofia and most recently, with Sally Ride, Buzz Aldrin and Jim Lovell to highlight Louis Vuitton’s environmental commitments:-
“Louis Vuitton…has a long-standing commitment to environmental responsibility. The core-values campaign is therefore a perfect opportunity to promote this cause, and Al Gore’s Climate Project [which they will also support with donations] is a natural match, a truly worldwide initiative to fight global warming.”
Louis Vuitton.
The ads have been shot beautifully and atmospherically by Annie Liebovitz.
Annie Liebovitz’s ‘At Work’ book, describing her many experiences, including the last portrait of John Lennon and Yoko Ono before his tragic murder and the infamous shot of John Cleese hanging like a bat, is a must for any photography book collection and is available in the Focus Hub Shop.
It is en vogue these days for editorial, and even advertising, shoots to be more risqué, by showing some nudity. An ordinary shoot suddenly becomes more edgy, even more arty. It’s a quite blasé attitude to fashion, where clothes are less important and it’s more about the mood and strength of the image. But how do you get the model to relax? One slightly unorthodox approach may be to get naked with your model, as shown below by the actions of established photographers Jurgen Teller, Mario Sorrenti and Terry Richardson (Kate Moss featuring in two of the images).
Of the Jurgen shoot, Charlotte Rampling says:
“The way he works is very free and easy, he puts you at ease really quickly…you have to trust someone to get to that stage. It’s important to feel released, and you can only do that when the photographer’s relaxed. It’s a lot of fun and it’s edgy.”
The Guardian
Be aware though, that only very established photographers can get away with this!
I know these have been around for a while now, but no good photography blog would be complete without this. Gucci has invested in renowned director, Chris Cunningham, to create a beautiful ad for their new fragrance, Flora. The ad’s cool simplicity and retake on Donna Summer’s classic ‘I Feel Love’ (Chris also did the music) makes this pure inspiration. The tv ad was also supported by a print campaign, shot by Inez van Lamsweerde and Vinoodh Matadin. I’ll be featuring them in a soon-to-come ‘creative collaborations’ post. For your viewing pleasure, I’ve also included the Behind the Scenes film of the ad.
Flora by Gucci
Behind the Scenes film
Image from Luxuo
You can purchase a great collection of Chris Cunningham’s work here on dvd.
And whilst on the subject of Jean-Paul Goude, here are two of my favourite ads ever. I remember watching Egoiste for the first time in awe, which made me seriously consider a career in film-making. I’m glad though that I stuck to photography, which has given me many great experiences over the years.
Chanel Egoiste for men, 1990
Vanessa Paradis for Coco Chanel, 1992
And after some digging about YouTube, I found this gem.
“This Fall 2009 season Halston will reinterpret the traditional show format with the launch of a digital concept revealing a 360?degree view of the Ready?to?Wear collection. The initiative synthesizes the most visual and tangible elements of Halston, and brings these to realization in an exclusively commissioned production, fusing the genres of fashion, film, music and art that serve as the foundation of the brand.
Produced by award?winning creative agencies, Blink Productions and Colonel Blimp, the video will capture the mood and inspirations of the designs worn by the Halston heroine Dree Hemingway as she moves through the film’s interior world created by director Nez Khammel. Khammel sought to evoke the enduring Halston mystique with vignettes styled to capture the associated glamour and decadence of a transient era.
This new medium and a viral marketing proposition provides a global platform for viewers to indulge in the captivating atmosphere of an intimate presentation, and by moving beyond the standard formula of catwalks and presentations Halston’s Fall 2009 film will create a true portal to the experience of fashion.”
This is the official press release from Halston’s PR department.
What it really translates to is “this is an amazing video release that reinterpretes the de rigeur fashion catwalk concept and gives us something so fresh, so beautiful and so classic that it will be referenced for years by all in the creative industries”. The video was filmed at Pinewood Studios, London where they shot along an ‘endless’ New York street (originally created for “The Bank Job”).
The star of the video is ‘one-to-watch’ Dree Hemingway, daughter of Mariel Hemingway, great-granddaughter of Ernest Hemingway. But we shouldn’t focus on her genetic celebrity, because Bree is a fast-rising star in her own right. Signed to Elite+ Model Management, she has already been shot by Craig McDean for Interview Magazine and Vogue UK has dedicated several pages in the July issue to her beauty and innate style, shot by Lachlan Bailey (both below).
She is a trained ballerina (which explains the effortless jumps in the Halston film) turned model and actress. Dree was born in America, went to drama school in London and then lived in Paris. She is truly international, which explains her personal style – New York elegance mixed with just enough European individuality.
“Where do you get your inspiration from?” is perhaps the question most frequently posed to creatives. And it’s a tough one to answer – there is so much in today’s modern life to inspire us, but mostly we are subjected to such a barrage of visual stimulus that it’s sometimes hard to separate ourselves and keep our thoughts pure and original.
Sometimes, the simple answer is to look to others for inspiration.
As photography addicts, we are constantly flicking through magazines hoping for the latest trend, a splash of colour or a quirky composition to spark our imagination. Many creatives reference retro imagery – examples of this are recent Stella McCartney ads (below) with definite influences from a beautiful Carlo Mollino book of his polaroid collections, which you can order here. You can see where themes from different images have been used to create the Stella ads, plus a very similar lighting technique to achieve the muted, polaroid feel. I had in fact bought this book as my own inspiration, but after seeing this campaign didn’t want to look like I had just copied it!
The message of this post is that sometimes we struggle to be wonderfully original and achieve great heights of individuality. This example shows how you can take an old image, modernise it and make it your own.
But what really matters is creating an image that you are proud to put your name to and which may in turn inspire others.
