Vogue: Like A Painting – Seoul

Exhibited:
Russian Hats III (2011)

Vogue like a painting explores the relationship between fashion photography and painting through a selection of images from the archive of Vogue magazine.

Taken by leading names in classical fashion photography and the most prominent photographers of the past decade, these pictures display characteristics that are traditionally attributed to painting. All of them, in one way or another, reflect devices commonly used by painters: theatrical settings, dramatic chiaroscuro, carefully devised compositional schemes and special emphasis on the beauty of the figures, their poses and the décor.

In the view of Debra Smith, curator of the show, the common thread that links these works is a sort of slowing-down: ‘an a-temporality in the pose of the models: a kind of mental time lapse in which everything is very, very still’.