The Los Angeles J. Paul Getty Museum, will open the new exhibit, “Icons of Style: A Century of Fashion Photography, 1911-2011”, later this month.
“Once overlooked by collectors and museums because of its commercial origins, fashion photography is now recognized as having produced some of the most creative work of the twentieth century, transcending its illustrative function to yield images of great artistic quality and sophistication,” stated Timothy Potts, director of the J. Paul Getty Museum. “Museums, however, have been slow to embrace this genre. The time seems ripe to present a sweeping overview of the finest examples of fashion photography produced over the past century.”
The exhibition covers most of the twentieth century, beginning in 1911, and going through the 1990s and extending through the early twenty first century.
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“My hope is that this sweeping introduction to fashion photography will not only educate and delight our visitors, but also inspire new scholarly inquiry,” commented Paul Martineau, associate curator of photographs at the Getty Museum and curator of the exhibition. “Long overlooked, the gradual integration of fashion photographs into museum collections will make it easier for these pictures to be evaluated in terms of the larger history of the medium of photography.”
The exhibition features numerous fashion photographers, including: Richard Avedon, Lillian Bassman, Guy Bourdin, Erwin Blumenfeld, Louise Dahl-Wolfe, Hiro, Inez & Vinoodh, Peter Lindbergh, Man Ray, Helmut Newton, Nick Knight, Gordon Parks, Irving Penn, Herb Ritts, Edward Steichen, Corinne Day, Gleb Derujinsky, Toni Frissell, Kourken Pakchanian and Tim Walker.
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Read more about the Getty Museum’s “Icons of Style: A Century of Fashion Photography, 1911-2011”, which opens on 26 June and runs through 21 October 2018, at getty.edu.