Fashion photography 21st century
Herbert Ritts Jr. was an American fashion photographer and director known for his photographs of celebrities, models, and other cultural figures throughout the 1980s and 1990s. His work concentrated on black and white photography and portraits, often in the style of classical Greek sculpture, which emphasized the human shape.
Richard Avedon was an American photographer and artist known for his iconic portraits and fashion photography.
Avedon began his career as a photographer in the late 1940s, working as a freelance photographer for magazines such as Harper's Bazaar and Vogue. He soon became known for his distinctive style, which was characterized by his use of simple, uncluttered backgrounds and his ability to capture the essence of his subjects.
Throughout his career, Avedon photographed some of the most famous people of his time, including Marilyn Monroe, Andy Warhol, and The Beatles. He was also known for his fashion photography, and his work appeared in many fashion magazines, including Harper's Bazaar and Vogue.
Avedon's work was often controversial, as he challenged traditional notions of beauty and fashion. He was known for his willingness to push boundaries, and his work was often seen as a reflection of the social and political issues of his time.
Today, Avedon is regarded as one of the most important photographers of the 20th century, and his work continues to inspire artists and photographers around the world.
Lillian Bassman was an American photographer and artist.
A magazine art director and fashion photographer, she became famous in the 1940s and '50s for her high-contrast, dreamy portraits of sylph-like models. Bassman's unique graphic style of photography illustrates the feminine mystique and glamour, as well as the boldness of an artist who blurs the lines between fashion photography and fine art. Working as art director for Bazaar magazine in 1945, she helped launch the careers of many of the century's most famous photographers.
Elsa and Johanna are a creative duo of photographic artists and filmmakers.
They were finalists for Prix HSBC pour la photographie 2016 and won the second Prix Picto de la mode 2017.
The duo's clients include well-known publications such as Le Temps, Boycott Magazine, L'Express 10, Crash Magazine, Etro, Boucheron and Apple.
Fernand Fonssagrives, born Fernand Vigoureux, is a French and American fashion photographer.
As a young man he moved to New York and became one of the world's leading fashion photographers of the 1940s and 1950s, shooting for Vogue, Town and Country and Harper's Bazaar magazines. Fonssagrives' iconic works are photos of nude women with patterns of sun reflections on their skin. In a unique partnership with his wife, legendary model Lisa Fonssagrives, he created his most significant works.
Francis Giacobetti is a French photographer and filmmaker.
In 1984 he began a series of celebrity photographs that included Federico Fellini, Stephen Hawking, Françoise Sagan, Philippe Starck, Yehudi Menuhin and others, over 200 in all. Known for being on the border between photography and painting, between craft and art, Francis Giacobetti has puzzled and delighted art masters with his series (Zebras, Iris, Anthem, numerous Bacon portraits). Like many photographers, he celebrates the beauty and perfection of the human body.
Giacobetti is also the director of the film Emmanuelle l'Antivierge (1975).
Ormond Gigli was an American photographer best known for his fashion and portrait photography. He was began his career as a freelance photographer in the 1940s, eventually becoming a staff photographer for several major publications, including LIFE, Time, and Harper's Bazaar.
Gigli's work is characterized by its striking use of color and composition, often featuring models in elaborate poses and settings. One of his most famous images is "Girls in the Windows," a photograph he took in 1960 of models posed in the windows of a Manhattan building slated for demolition.
Throughout his career, Gigli received numerous awards and accolades for his work, including the Lifetime Achievement Award from the American Society of Media Photographers in 2003. His photographs have been exhibited in galleries and museums around the world, and are held in the collections of many major institutions, including the Museum of Modern Art in New York and the National Portrait Gallery in Washington, D.C.
Walde Huth, née Waldberta Huth, is a German photographer known for her street photos and portraits of famous people and fashion models.
She graduated from the State School of Applied Arts in Weimar, and after World War II she became a freelance photographer doing portrait and art photography. Walde Huth is primarily known for her fashion shots of the '50s, she also took unique stills and advertising photos, and created portraits of famous contemporaries. Her iconic fashion shots were taken in Paris. She shot the most famous models of her time not in the studio, but on location in the city, in front of the Eiffel Tower, along the Seine River, in contrast to the architecture and street life.
Walde Huth was an exceptional woman, a creative artist and a versatile photographer.
William Klein was an American-born French photographer and filmmaker noted for his ironic approach to both media and his extensive use of unusual photographic techniques in the context of photojournalism and fashion photography. He was ranked 25th on Professional Photographer's list of 100 most influential photographers.
Klein trained as a painter, studying under Fernand Léger, and found early success with exhibitions of his work. He soon moved on to photography and achieved widespread fame as a fashion photographer for Vogue and for his photo essays on various cities. He directed feature-length fiction films, numerous short and feature-length documentaries and produced over 250 television commercials.
Karl Otto Lagerfeld is a German fashion designer, designer, photographer, collector and publisher.
Karl found himself in the fashion world by chance, as he planned to work as an illustrator. At the age of 21, he entered the 1954 International Woolmark Prize and won first place for his sketch of a coat, which launched his career. For the next 65 years, fashion remained the foundation of his work, although he spent his life actively expressing himself in other areas of art.
In 1987, Karl shot his first advertising campaign and developed a passion for photography. In 1999, he opened his own photography studio in Paris, where he has taken countless images of the world's greatest figures in art and fashion. Many of Carl's photographs have also been used in art books. Karl was also a master of self-portraits: throughout his life he photographed and painted his iconic image.
A passionate bibliophile (his personal library numbered 300,000 volumes), Lagerfeld merged his photography studio with the 7L bookstore and later opened EDITIONS 7L, a publishing house specializing in books on design and photography. He was also involved in various interior design and architecture projects.
In 1965 Lagerfeld took over the Italian fashion house Fendi, where he created collections of leather and fur garments, and in 1983 he became the artistic director of the French house Chanel - with these companies he had lifetime contracts. In 1984, Lagerfeld founded his own fashion house, Karl Lagerfeld Impression.
Saul Leiter was an American photographer and fashion photographer, one of the pioneers of what was later called the New York School of Photographers in the 1940s and 1950s.
Saul Leiter began doing color and black-and-white street photography in New York City in the 1940s. He had no formal training in photography, but the genius of his early work was quickly recognized. His main subjects were street scenes and his small circle of friends. Leiter made a huge and unique contribution to photography during his prolific period in New York in the 1950s. His abstract forms and radically innovative compositions have a painterly quality that stands out among the work of his New York School contemporaries. His sense of color and densely compressed urban life represents a truly unique vision of those times. Leiter is now considered a pioneer of early color photography and is noted as one of the outstanding figures in postwar photography.
For 20 years Leiter also worked as a fashion photographer and was published in leading fashion magazines.
Christopher Makos is an American photographer and artist living and working in New York City.
Makos has traveled extensively in Europe, studied architecture in Paris, and studied with photographer Man Ray. In 1977 he met media artist and pop art star Andy Warhol and has been friends, traveled with him and photographed him extensively ever since. Makos published several acclaimed books on Warhol, and the latter called Makos "the most modern photographer in America."
In addition to him, Makos took photographic portraits of many art stars, including Elizabeth Taylor, Salvador Dali, John Lennon and Mick Jagger. His work has been published by many of the world's most famous magazines.
Helmut Newton (born Helmut Neustädter) was a German-Australian photographer. The New York Times described him as a "prolific, widely imitated fashion photographer whose provocative, erotically charged black-and-white photos were a mainstay of Vogue and other publications."
Jacques Olivar is a Moroccan fashion and advertising photographer and filmmaker.
In his youth he worked as a pilot of passenger air transport, but by the age of 40 he finally realized that photography is his vocation. And he became successful quite quickly. Since 1987, fashion photography has become his main profession. Jacques Olivar works for leading fashion magazines and has won many awards.
Emotion, elegance and beauty are the invariable key elements underlying Jacques Olivar's photographic works. The black and white images create an atmosphere of neorealism, while the color images seem to reference the heyday of cinema and build on the idea of the "American Dream".
Irving Penn was an American photographer celebrated for his influential work in fashion photography, portraits, and still lifes. Penn's journey into photography began with a background in painting and design, studying at the Philadelphia Museum School of Industrial Art. He moved to New York and initially worked in design and illustration, which paved the way for his transition into photography. Notably, Penn's work at Vogue magazine for over six decades helped define the visual style of mid-20th-century fashion photography.
Irving Penn's mastery extended beyond the camera to the darkroom, where he experimented with various printing techniques, including the platinum-palladium process, which contributed to the depth and subtlety of his prints. His works, such as the "Cigarette" series and his still life compositions, are renowned for their minimalistic elegance and meticulous detail. Irving Penn's artistry was not confined to one genre; his "Earthly Bodies" nudes series and street material collection demonstrated his versatility and depth as an artist.
His contributions to photography are preserved and celebrated in numerous exhibitions and collections worldwide, including major museums like The Metropolitan Museum of Art, The Museum of Modern Art, and The Art Institute of Chicago. Irving Penn's legacy as a pioneering figure in photography continues to inspire artists and photographers today.
If you're a collector or an expert in art and antiques, staying updated on Irving Penn's works can be invaluable. To receive updates on new product sales and auction events related to Irving Penn, consider signing up for our newsletter. This way, you won't miss out on the opportunity to own a piece of photographic history.
Marianne "Manni" Sayn-Wittgenstein-Sayn, real name Maria Anna Sayn-Wittgenstein-Sayn, née Mayr-Melnhof, is a dowager princess and Austrian photographer.
On her mother's side, Maria is a direct descendant of Empress Maria Theresa, which has opened all doors of aristocracy, business, politics and art to her. She was encouraged to take up photography by Lilly Palmer and Karl Lagerfeld after her husband died in 1962. Soon she was working with Frau im Spiegel magazine, then Bunte and Vogue.
Wherever she was - skiing in St. Moritz, on a yacht, at parties and weddings, in Europe and in America, Maria photographed everyone around her: Onassis and Maria Callas, Prince Charles, Gianni Agnelli, Romy Schneider, Luciano Pavarotti, the Queen Mother or King Juan Carlos. During her lifetime she photographed many world celebrities. By her centenary, Maria had more than 300,000 of her photographs in her archive.
Maria never took immodest or offensive photos of her friends. Princess Caroline of Monaco once joked, "You're not a paparazzi, you're a mamarazza," thus the nickname Marianne Sayn-Wittgenstein-Sayn was born.
Bert Stern, real name Bertram Stern, is an American fashion photographer and documentary filmmaker.
His career began with the iconic and legendary Smirnoff Vodka advertising campaign in 1955. Using a well-equipped studio, Stern experimented with many of the latest techniques, including videotaping, screen printing, photo offset combinations and computer prints. His brilliant work made him a star in the advertising world, photographing advertising campaigns for Canon, Dupont, Pepsi-Cola, US Steel and Volkswagen brands. One of the high points of Bert Stern's career was working for Vogue in the 1960s.
Despite his drug addiction, the fashion photographer was sought after by Madison Avenue, Hollywood and the international fashion scene for decades.
Stern was one of the last photographers to shoot Marilyn Monroe in June and July 1962, six months before her death. Some of these photographs were published in Vogue magazine. In 1982, Bert Stern published The Last Sitting, a book that includes many of his more than 2,500 images, including those that Monroe did not like and were crossed out.
Stern directed and cinematographed the films Jazz on a Summer's Day (1959), A Date with an Angel (1987), and The Unknown Marilyn (2012).
Ellen von Unwerth is a German photographer, director, and model.
She began her career as a photo model and later became a fashion and advertising photographer. Unwerth's work has been published in many fashion magazines, and she is best known for her playfully erotic shots of female pop musicians and models.
John Rankin Waddell, known as Rankin, is a British portrait photographer, fashion photographer, director, and publisher.
He works in fashion and portrait photography and has created portraits of many famous personalities of the world. Rankin also shoots music videos, documentaries, feature films, and commercials. He publishes his own photography magazines and books.
Bruce Weber is an American fashion photographer and occasional filmmaker. He has made ad campaigns for Calvin Klein, Ralph Lauren, Pirelli, Abercrombie & Fitch, Revlon, and Gianni Versace, and made work for Vogue, GQ, Vanity Fair, Elle, Life, Interview, and Rolling Stone magazines.