transcript

Speaker 1:
[00:08] Hi everybody, welcome to The Rest Is History. I'm delighted to say that our exclusive mini-series about photography and history is now into the third episode. And Chris, we're going to be talking about fashion. Now, once again, we are here at the Getty Archive, courtesy of Getty Images. And we're joined by Chris Floyd, the great photographer who has photographed among other people, Paul McCartney, David Attenborough, Keir Starmer and me and Tabby for the book club, which is very exciting. Now, if you are only listening to this, it might be a good idea to watch it so you can see the photos. So you can watch it on Spotify or of course on our super shiny website in the exclusive members area. And talking of exclusive members content, if you want to learn more about the photos or you want to see them, they will of course be in a fantastic new newsletter, which should be winging its way into your inboxes very soon. So Chris, welcome back to The Rest Is History.

Speaker 2:
[01:03] Great to be here.

Speaker 1:
[01:04] And we're going to be talking about fashion. So talk to me about fashion, Chris.

Speaker 2:
[01:08] So I am not a fashion photographer. However, I think in my humble opinion that fashion photography is where the most innovative techniques, ideas and methods come from in the world of photography. It's like a giant playground.

Speaker 1:
[01:25] Right.

Speaker 2:
[01:26] Everything is in service to the final image. So photographers and makeup artists and stylists and designers, they are afforded the time and the space to kind of experiment and play.

Speaker 1:
[01:38] So this is a big difference with, for example, the very first episode we did, which was about revolutions. There you're working with the raw materials, which is reality, which is what's happening in front of you and you're recording it. With this, your imagination has complete free rein. And presumably also the budgets are much bigger.

Speaker 2:
[01:54] Yes, definitely. You're limited by your imagination and the amount of money they're going to give you to do it.

Speaker 1:
[01:59] Right. And of course, you know, fashion predates photography. So, fashion would have spread in, let's say, the 19th century by illustrations and magazines and whatnot. And by emulation, by copying the people that you saw. But then when you get to the 20th century and fashion photography begins in earnest, people can become a lot more creative. There's a huge boom between the wars as you get the rise of photo magazines and photo journalism. And actually, I think our first photograph is from the period where the Second World War has just broken out or is just breaking out.

Speaker 2:
[02:30] Yes, Horst P. Horst, who was not born with that name. His born name was Horst Borman.

Speaker 1:
[02:37] Right.

Speaker 2:
[02:37] But someone told me that he changed it. He changed it because he didn't want to be associated with Martin Borman or didn't want people to think he was related to Martin Borman.

Speaker 1:
[02:46] That's fair enough.

Speaker 2:
[02:47] Someone at Condé Nast told me that. Whether that's true, I don't know. But anyway, that's why he's called Horst P. Horst.

Speaker 1:
[02:54] Right. And he's obviously he's German and he studied architecture. Is that right? And then went to Paris.

Speaker 2:
[03:00] Went to Paris and he became a photographer there.

Speaker 1:
[03:03] So what's the photograph that we're talking about?

Speaker 2:
[03:05] The picture we're going to talk about here is the Mainbocher Corset, 1939, taken literally on the eve of the Second World War in Paris. It was commissioned for the French Vogue collections edition. But with the outbreak of war, that edition was scrapped and never happened and they sent the photo on to American Vogue and then it was first published in American Vogue. It was also the last picture Horst did before he fled Europe for America. I've got a quote here from what he said about it. So he said, the sitting took all day and they finished in small hours. He said it took all day because he'd never photographed a corset before. Then he said they finished in the early hours and he recalled that he went back to the house, packed my bags and caught the seven o'clock train to L'Arvre to board the SS Normandy. I knew that life would be completely different now. I'd found a family in Paris in a way of life. The clothes, the books, the apartment, all was left behind. The photograph is peculiar. For me it is the essence of that moment. While I was taking it, I was thinking of all that I was leaving behind. And that's it. And Elfie went to New York.

Speaker 1:
[04:08] So this is, I mean, literally the last photograph that he takes before leaving Europe as war breaks out. And for people who aren't watching this but are listening to it, so it's a woman photographed from behind. It's a very sort of stark black and white image, a lot of shadows. We never see the corset in front.

Speaker 2:
[04:25] No.

Speaker 1:
[04:25] So basically what we're looking at is the lacing of the corset. And the thing with this that strikes me as a complete layman is there's an element of the kind of Greek statue about the war. Yeah. The way that she's poised and she's sort of frozen, as it were, as if in stone. And then the attention to detail to the lacing of the corset, which is the thing that really strikes you. And you never actually see the corset from the front, which is the thing that you would have thought would sell it.

Speaker 2:
[04:53] It's all about form and also the lighting is so exquisite. It's much more complicated than it looks. It looks like it's just lit with one light, but it's not. There's a light over on the left side that's kind of giving us a kind of glow from underneath. The model was a woman called Madame Bernon, of which we know very little. But you know, for me, I picked this because I just think it's such an exquisite example of form, of form in photography. Really, it's about shape, light, and very little else. And also the mystery of the model, Madame Bernon.

Speaker 1:
[05:24] Yeah, the fact that we don't see her face.

Speaker 2:
[05:26] Don't see her face, don't know what she looks like.

Speaker 1:
[05:28] Yeah, it's crucial to the appeal of this, I guess.

Speaker 2:
[05:30] It's also, it's a sort of mythic, Greek mythic idea of femininity and womanhood, isn't it?

Speaker 1:
[05:36] Yeah, completely. You've got the hourglass figure, which the corset obviously accentuates. And the attention to the lacing of the corset, I mean, I think that's so beautiful, isn't it? I mean, that's where your eyes initially goes to, I think.

Speaker 2:
[05:49] Yeah.

Speaker 1:
[05:50] And it's the sort of intricacy of it. And at this point, do you think photographers like Horst think of photography as a fine art? Because that's the implication of this picture.

Speaker 2:
[06:02] Yeah, I think, you know, the thing about Horst is that he moved in such rarefied circles. He worked before he did his own thing. He worked for a photographer called George Hoenig and Hoonig, who was his sort of, I guess, mentor. But they had a bit of a falling out. And, you know, they're all in their own ways, kind of diva-ish people.

Speaker 1:
[06:20] Right.

Speaker 2:
[06:20] Yeah, they're magnificent really in their diva-ishness. So they lived a life devoted to beauty, elegance, aesthetics. You know, it's an aesthetic existence.

Speaker 1:
[06:30] And then what happened to Horst after he went to America?

Speaker 2:
[06:32] Well, he spent the rest of his life living and working in America. He died, I think, in 1999. And then Madonna used that image, she recreated that for her Vogue video.

Speaker 1:
[06:43] Of course, I was wondering where I'd seen it before. Yeah.

Speaker 2:
[06:46] When was that? It would have been 1990.

Speaker 1:
[06:47] Yeah.

Speaker 2:
[06:48] Madonna Vogue, which was directed by David Fincher, that video.

Speaker 1:
[06:51] Was it? Yeah.

Speaker 2:
[06:53] By the time you get to the 80s and 90s, we're entering a period where there's now quite a significant history. And you're entering a world of homage. It's happening quite a lot. Yeah.

Speaker 1:
[07:02] People are resurrecting and recreating the history.

Speaker 2:
[07:04] And not long before he died, he did say about that picture, I don't know how I did it. I couldn't repeat it. It was created by emotion because he said the photograph was taken just as old Europe dissolved in flames. You know, and he left it behind and it marked the end of an era.

Speaker 1:
[07:18] But the interesting thing is, again, as an outsider, you wouldn't look at this and say this is a war photograph. The shadow of war is not obvious in the photo, would you say it is?

Speaker 2:
[07:27] No, it's not. Because it's also about a world where the outside world is shut out. This is a world of aspiration.

Speaker 1:
[07:36] Yeah.

Speaker 2:
[07:36] Because what so much fashion photography is about, it's about aspiration and about wanting to, creating images that make people want to buy the clothes and be like the girl in the picture.

Speaker 1:
[07:46] Yeah, it's interesting that you spread them out on the table, the photos you choose, a lot of them are in these kind of, idealized or nostalgic kind of landscapes that don't really exist, which actually brings us to the next picture. So this, you know, really does seem to float free from context. So you've actually got an example of it on the cover of a book here by NI. Eisenin, A Spy in the House of Love. And that's not what the image was created for. What was this image created for?

Speaker 2:
[08:13] This was a cover for Vogue magazine, January 1950, Vogue. And interestingly, in all the back and forth we've been having, Aaliyah and I in preparing for this day. This was my very last suggestion only a couple of days ago. What did she say? And I sent, texted her that picture and said, I think we need something that links Horst to what comes a little bit later. We need a link. She said, you'll never guess what. And she sent me a back, a picture of A Spy in the House of Love by NI. Eisenin. She said, this is what I'm reading at the moment.

Speaker 1:
[08:43] Wow. Serendipity.

Speaker 2:
[08:45] Yeah.

Speaker 1:
[08:46] So that's why we're featuring it. So the story behind this, it's Vogue, January 1950. And for people who are just listening, it is a close up of a woman's white face. And in the, certainly in the book cover, all you see is the eye, which is heavily made up, and the red mouth, the kind of red lipsticked mouth.

Speaker 2:
[09:06] And a beauty spot below her lip.

Speaker 1:
[09:07] So talk me through why, what this image was created.

Speaker 2:
[09:10] So Erwin Blumenfeld, he took this, was born in Berlin.

Speaker 1:
[09:13] Yeah.

Speaker 2:
[09:14] A lot of Germans.

Speaker 1:
[09:15] Yeah.

Speaker 2:
[09:15] In this, a lot of Jewish Germans, actually. Who shaped the fashion.

Speaker 1:
[09:19] And is that because fashion photography attracted people who perhaps saw themselves as outsiders or?

Speaker 2:
[09:23] I wonder if a lot of it came out of the sort of Weimar.

Speaker 1:
[09:26] Oh, yeah. The Weimar artistic world.

Speaker 2:
[09:28] The Weimar period, yeah. It came out of that. Surrealism, Dadaism, all of those things.

Speaker 1:
[09:34] Yeah, well, you can definitely see the surrealist influence on this picture.

Speaker 2:
[09:37] He was born in 1897. And he was, yeah, he was involved in the avant-garde cultural scene in Berlin. Right. But then he moved to Holland. And in the 20s and 30s, he ran a leather goods business.

Speaker 1:
[09:48] Okay, very glamorous.

Speaker 2:
[09:50] But pursuing photography more seriously. And then when the Nazis came to power, he fled, got out of there and went even further west, emigrating to the US in 1941.

Speaker 1:
[10:00] So another refugee from all Europe who ends up in New York.

Speaker 2:
[10:04] In the 30s, he had been working for French Vogue, Vogue Paris. But then his move to New York really marked the beginning of a very successful commercial period for him. He really was extremely in demand and successful as a photographer. But really what he did was bring all this surrealist sensibility to what up until that point was a straightforward kind of out and out commercial business, the business of garments. You've got the garment district in New York. It's about shifting clothes. All these refugees from Europe really brought all that with them.

Speaker 1:
[10:37] And so a question about this particular image, what's it selling?

Speaker 2:
[10:40] That's a very good point. It's selling Vogue. You know, it's selling Vogue magazine.

Speaker 1:
[10:43] It's just a cover for Vogue.

Speaker 2:
[10:45] It's a cover for Vogue. It's also tied in really to the creation of brand identity. It's just so associated with Vogue, that Vogue cover.

Speaker 1:
[10:54] The model was Jean Patchett.

Speaker 2:
[10:56] Jean Patchett was the model. But what Blumenfeld did was the original picture is black and white, black and white picture of Jean Patchett. And then he printed a version where he masked out everything except for one eye and eyebrow and the mouth. And the beauty spot. So the entire other half of her face, her other eye and her nostrils and her nose have all gone. He masked them out in the dark room. So you end up with a black and white picture. That's just the eye and the lips and stuff. And then Vogue hand-coloured it. So the colour version that everyone knows was hand-coloured. Yeah, it was tinted with paint.

Speaker 1:
[11:28] And as a total layman and an idiot, and there's nothing about either photography or fashion, I'm curious about why it's so much more effective when it's been reduced to just the eye and the mouth and the beauty spot, and it's lost the nose and the other eye and so on. Is it because it's become more abstract or why is it so? Because it is much more effective the more you reduce it, but I'm curious about why that is.

Speaker 2:
[11:47] It's a pure distillation of pure raw femininity. It's the red lips, the arched eyebrow, the eye makeup, the eyeshadow that she's got on her eyelid, that's been painted on as well on the print. It's like a classic mid-century manifestation of the idealisation of womanhood, of femininity and sexuality, isn't it? Because she sort of looks like a cat, in a way. There's a sort of feline-ness to her.

Speaker 1:
[12:13] It's accentuated by the eyes, isn't it? Yeah, I agree. And I think the fact that it's 1950 is telling, because it's basically the war is over. There's a thirst for glamour and for excitement, and sensation and beauty and so on. And the magazine is greeting a new decade. And there's a sort of confidence in that image to be able to choose something so unusual and so striking.

Speaker 2:
[12:33] You know what it is? You come out of the war, rationing the horrible clothes, you know, make do and mend, and you come into this era where the heightening of what it is to be a woman. Yeah. And it's also her aloofness. She's got unbelievably aloof, haughty.

Speaker 1:
[12:48] Yes. Yeah, she's not smiling.

Speaker 2:
[12:49] No.

Speaker 1:
[12:50] Yeah. And it's obviously, I mean, you say the appetite for kind of putting the war behind you and stuff. I mean, it's only three years at this point after Christian Dior unveiled the new look in Paris, the kind of swirling the great gowns and stuff.

Speaker 2:
[13:01] Where you could use as much fabric as you like to get, you know.

Speaker 1:
[13:04] Yeah, exactly. All right, so we move forward to the 80s to 1988, no less. So the year that George Bush was elected US President and Wimbledon beat Liverpool in the FA Cup final. So was that 1-0? 1-0, and Laurie Sanchez got the goal from a corner, if you remember. Remember that?

Speaker 2:
[13:22] Crazy gang.

Speaker 1:
[13:22] Crazy gang have beaten the Culture Club. Didn't think we'd bring that in, but we have. So Nick Knight, talk to us about this picture.

Speaker 2:
[13:28] Nick Knight. So when I was at college in 1988, I was doing photography. I was doing a BTEC in photography at Northeast Surrey College of Technology in Yule, near Epsom.

Speaker 1:
[13:37] Got the glamour.

Speaker 2:
[13:38] Yeah. When I first looked around to try and study photography, I didn't even know that things like art colleges existed. I didn't know about them. And the only place I could find where you could do photography as a college course was a technical college, which is really designed... Those courses are designed to produce photographers who are technically competent and can do things like forensics photography or industrial photography. You know, things with a very practical commercial purpose. So, arty creative photography was something that I didn't know you could go and study that anywhere. So, anyway, I'm at college and someone brought in a magazine and in it was this advert for Japanese designer Yoji Yamamoto. And this was this campaign that Nick Knight had shot for Yoji. He was the first photographer I ever saw who was living and working today and producing work that was completely stunning and innovative, clever, creative. Because everything happened to that point that I had been influenced by or seen was from people who were either dead or very old. Like Horst was, who we just talked about, Horst was still alive when I was at college, but he was 80 something, you know. Here's Nick Knight, who in 1988 is what, he's 30 years old. So he had studied at Bournemouth College of Art. He did a book on skinheads in 1982, which he published, you know, on that. And that's what got him noticed. And then from there, he really moved and he was working for ID Magazine, you know, all those, the beginning of ID. He is a ground building block, you know, a fundamental pillar of all those style mags in the 80s, ID and then the face and things like that. So this Yoji picture, it's of a model called Susie Bick. And I think it was actually a reshoot. They had done a shoot with another model, but Yoji didn't like it and they redid it. And the stylist who was, you know, styling the shoots said, I think we might be able to get Susie Bick. And Nick Knight, you know, I've seen an interview with him on something, talking about it, and they thought that that might be, you know, that would be a kind of step up for them in a way to get Susie Bick. She comes in and he was very used to being very controlling and directing models. And he started to try and tell her what to do. And then someone else on the shoot said, don't tell Susie Bick what to do, just let her do her thing. And he said he took that as a, it was a great relief and he relaxed after that. The shoot went on all day and all night, very late, and this picture was taken very late at night when I think she was exhausted.

Speaker 1:
[16:22] To describe it for people who can't see it, who are just listening, she's in kind of purple, isn't she? Is it purple?

Speaker 2:
[16:27] It's a kind of purplish coat.

Speaker 1:
[16:28] She's lounging on this chair. She looks very weary, but it's a very, very stylized image. She's got a cigarette in her left hand, loads of smoke sort of billowing up towards the ceiling. Again, rather like the Mainbocher Corset, you can't see her face. We can see that it's kind of very whitened, but it's obscured by her black bob kind of haircut.

Speaker 2:
[16:45] She's got this pin sharp black bob. Actually, that kind of makes me think of very sort of Weimar era Berlin feel to it.

Speaker 1:
[16:53] It's got a real kind of 1920s feel to it.

Speaker 2:
[16:57] And she had said that she was exhausted after such a long day and she slumped in. She was basically having a cigarette, having a break for five minutes and having a cigarette.

Speaker 1:
[17:07] There's a kind of abstraction to this actually, isn't there, with the colours? So the backdrop is kind of greeny yellow. She's just a sort of shape in purple and blue, and that's what gives it its power, do you think?

Speaker 2:
[17:18] Yeah, but it's also an incredibly strong posture, isn't it? Everything about her is kind of rigidity, even though she slumped. She slumped in this rigid way.

Speaker 1:
[17:28] Really angular.

Speaker 2:
[17:29] Yeah, angular. The way her legs outstretched, then you've got the hairline on top of her hair, and then the kind of strange, kind of slightly psychedelic colouring in the background. You know, one thing I'll say about Nick Knight is that it's also really important, is he worked with a printer called Brian Dowling, who is an absolutely incredible colour photographic printer, printed by hand, and that they would have worked on this image for days and days and days, in the darkroom, printing it, using masks, masking areas off, changing the colour of this part or that part. This is as much a creation of Brian Dowling, I suspect, as it is of Nick Knight. It's a Nick Knight photograph, but he couldn't have done it as well as this without Brian Dowling.

Speaker 1:
[18:08] And the question in my mind is that this is obviously, in a way that the Mainbucket Corset obviously isn't. This is a photograph that's aware of fashion history. It's got a very retro quality to it, which feels very 80s actually, kind of postmodern, kind of grabbing stuff from the past and resurrecting it. And do you think, is this the point in photographer's history where it starts to become very self-aware and photographers are aware of what's gone before and deliberately re-creating it?

Speaker 2:
[18:35] Yeah, I think you have a generation of photographers who come slightly in the wake of Nick Knight, little, two or three years later, and we'll come onto a couple of those in a minute, who I think are very conscious of what has come before them. By the time we get into the late 80s, I think there's plenty of new, innovative stuff happening all the time. But people are starting to carry the baggage of history on their back with photography, because for the first half of the 20th century, it was really relatively new medium. And then you have this phenomenal body of imagery created really from the 20s to the 60s, 70s. And then after that, you're far enough away from it. By the time you get to the 80s, you're far enough away from the 50s. Like, it's interesting, isn't it? In the 80s, you have massive resurgence in 50s nostalgia with Nick Kamen and Levi's 501s ads and using old music for those ads and things like that. So the current was starting to eat the past again, you know. But I don't necessarily think that this, that's the case with this picture. I remember just so clearly seeing it when I was at college and it just blew me away just thinking how innovative and clever it was. And just, you know, the way the cigarette smoke curls up, it's just, it's just something just absolutely glorious about it.

Speaker 1:
[19:52] So we're in the 1990s and you mentioned magazines and we, you mentioned magazines like ID and the Face. And we're going to be talking about an image from the Face magazine, which is still going in the mid 1990s. And this is an image that might not look like a, I mean, it definitely doesn't look like a traditional fashion image at all. And this is by the photographer Elaine Constantine. She had worked with Nick Knight, is that right? She had-

Speaker 2:
[20:13] She, Elaine, was working at Salford College in Lancashire. And she was a demonstrator, which she said was a technician, come lecturer, from 88 to 92. And she had been shooting. She was also very heavily into Northern South, the Northern Soul music scene.

Speaker 1:
[20:35] Yeah.

Speaker 2:
[20:36] It was a massive part of her life. The college, she was doing the design students, fashion design students. She would photograph their sort of end of term or end of course collections and things like that. And then an old lecturer from the college introduced her to Nick Knight. And then she sort of went down to London and she worked for Nick for a while. And then that ended and she came back to Manchester and decided, right, I've got to make a new portfolio now. Did that, then went back to London, took it to all the magazines like The Face and ID and Time Out. And then a guy called Stuart Spalding, he was an art director at The Face magazine, gave her a job. She said, you know, at that point, I didn't have a specific goal in mind. I was just very happy to shoot whatever he asked me to shoot.

Speaker 1:
[21:23] Yeah.

Speaker 2:
[21:25] So that's where she began. And then she began to meet like-minded people who saw the world in the same way as her. So there's a stylist called Polly Banks that she met, who they're really kindred spirits. And she said that, you know, I didn't want to shoot fashion where girls, where it was just about girls being sexy. I didn't want to shoot sexy girls doing sexy things. I wanted to shoot girls who behaved in the way that I behaved, me and my mates. And that is really, really evident in our whole body of work.

Speaker 1:
[21:55] And are these professional models or are they just random? Yeah.

Speaker 2:
[21:58] The other thing she also said was that she was very fussy about models. She needed girls who were willing to go there. She would treat a shoot like a day out. We're going to go, in this case, to Brighton and we're going to have a day out. And we're going to drink and have a laugh and I'm going to document that. And that's what she did.

Speaker 1:
[22:15] And just a question. They've been commissioned to do this with clothes provided by it. So they're actually advertising for a particular...

Speaker 2:
[22:21] Well, it's a fashion editorial shoot. And then all the clothes are credited. Where they're from, how much they are, or who sells them.

Speaker 1:
[22:29] And the manufacturers wouldn't mind the fact that you're drinking and having fun.

Speaker 2:
[22:32] No, no, no. It's editorial. So you can do what you want. I mean, the brands will be thrilled to be in a magazine like this and have a photographer like her shoot their stuff. Everyone gains out of that. They went to Brighton for the day and at the end of the Brighton Pier, there's loads of people down there with chips, trying to feed seagulls with chips. It's just like, we've got to do that. We've got to do that picture. Also, you're in a world time before digital, shooting on film. So she said, you know, I've got, you know, she said she shot, they went through seven bags of chips.

Speaker 1:
[23:03] That's what she said. Wow.

Speaker 2:
[23:05] And, you know, she goes, you know, she'd take a chip, hold it up, see, go come down. I pressed the shutter. No idea whether I've got it or not. Rolls and rolls of film, you know, or seven bags of chips worth of photos.

Speaker 1:
[23:15] It reminds me of when I had to, so I once had to eat, I think it was something like eight plates of meatballs in Ikea for a TV series about the eighties. So I had to just sit there eating eight plates of meatballs, doing this piece to camera, and then they cut the sequence. Good meatballs though, to be fair.

Speaker 2:
[23:31] Oh yeah. So it's pretty much the same here.

Speaker 1:
[23:33] Yeah, same story. So to just ascribe these to people who are listening and not watching on our websites or on Spotify, this picture of the girl feeding the seagulls. So it's just a sort of close up of the girl, and she's got her arm outstretched, she's got a chip in her hand. The seagull is poised to steal the chip. And I think what makes it is the fact that her eyes are closed.

Speaker 2:
[23:52] Kind of wintery light of this. I mean, this is the December issue, so December 97. So they probably would have shot this in, I'm guessing maybe October.

Speaker 1:
[24:02] Can I ask a question about the colours? So the colours, it feels kind of hyper real with these saturated colours. I don't know if that's even the right word, the right expression. And that reminds me a bit of like Martin Parr or a photographer like that.

Speaker 2:
[24:13] Well, Dominic, it's interesting that you say that because one of Elaine's great influences and friends was Martin Parr. There was a chap called Peter Fraser who knew Martin Parr and then Elaine met him. And then Peter Fraser, I think, was printing some of Elaine's pictures for her because she couldn't get in with Brian Dowling, who was too busy printing Nick Knight's pictures. Right. And then he did some of these pictures, the ones we're talking about here. And then he said, oh, I'm going to show these to Martin, who he also knew, and then apparently showed them to Martin Parr and Martin said, oh, they look a bit like my pictures. And then they met and just became great friends. And right up until Martin died recently. What it is, is what we call on camera flash, where you have a flash gun on the camera. Or you can, it doesn't have to be right on the camera, you can hand hold it separately. Using the available light, which is the daylight, which is why you've got the sea and blue sky in the background. And then there's a light lighting the girl here and the seagull, and it's a very bright pop of flash. And that is what gives you your hyper real colour thing. And then the same again with this other one, Girls on Bike, same thing.

Speaker 1:
[25:24] It's three girls going downhill, they're all sort of screaming and shrieking and their faces are contorted on bikes. They're cycling down the hill, they're wearing very brightly coloured clothes, which are juxtaposed against the kind of the white stucco of the Brighton houses and the incredibly blue sky behind.

Speaker 2:
[25:42] But this one, the Girls on Bikes, is the girl on the right and the red jumper is actually fixed, is static. And she's on a bike with a clamp holding it still. And these two are the ones actually coming down the hill at speed. And then someone's just off to the right with a hairdryer just blowing her hair. Oh, wow.

Speaker 1:
[25:57] So that is the contrivance though.

Speaker 2:
[25:59] Yeah, totally.

Speaker 1:
[25:59] That we've been talking about in the series. So this is a contrived photo. It's not authentic.

Speaker 2:
[26:04] No. Well, it is authentic in that those girls have to keep coming down the hill.

Speaker 1:
[26:07] Yeah.

Speaker 2:
[26:08] For real.

Speaker 1:
[26:08] But the one girl.

Speaker 2:
[26:09] The one girl on the right, because she said she couldn't get to a position with the camera where she could get the shot of all three of them and not get run over by one of the bikes.

Speaker 1:
[26:17] Right.

Speaker 2:
[26:18] So that's why they work that out.

Speaker 1:
[26:19] Oh, right.

Speaker 2:
[26:20] But it's the sort of hyper. It's taking reality and amping it up, isn't it?

Speaker 1:
[26:25] Which is what fashion photography in its essence is, I suppose. All right, let's move to our very last photographer.

Speaker 2:
[26:30] This last one is Glen Luchford, who following on from Elaine in Brighton is, Glen is actually from Brighton. He was born in the same year as me, actually in 1968. He was assisting a photographer called Norman Watson, who himself is the son of a very famous photographer called Albert Watson. That's the thing we were talking about earlier about photographers being aware of lineage really and stuff. I think Glen learned a lot from Norman Watson, who had an incredible encyclopedic knowledge of photographers.

Speaker 1:
[27:02] These Glen Luchford pictures are for Prada, is that right? What immediately strikes me about them, and to describe them for people who are only listening, they are very cinematic. They feel deliberately old-fashioned. They look like they are, I mean, they could be stills from films. There's a narrative component to them. Yeah, there's a reason why they are where they are. It's like you're in the middle of a story, and you don't know what the story is. And again, do you think that's because somebody like that, who came of age when he did, so late 80s, early 90s, is very aware of photographers' history and kind of its relationship with Hollywood or something? Do you think that's part of it?

Speaker 2:
[27:39] So, Glen is massively influenced by cinema. And he's talked about this. Wong Kar Wai was the director as a huge influence on him. And funnily enough, he said that he was very influenced by Wong Kar Wai. And then Wong Kar Wai made a film called In the Mood for Love around the year 2000. And Wong Kar Wai told Muchia Prada, Mrs. Prada, that he was really influenced in the way he made that film by Glen Luchford's photos, which is pretty kind of... Glen himself said that's quite meta. He said that he saw two films growing up that influenced this particular shot of Amber Valletta in the boat. So they're in a boat, a rowing boat, it looks like. It's on the River Tiber. They had the river shut down for the shoot. It was for the Autumn, Winter 1997 Prada campaign. He said they had the money to pay the city of Rome, close off the river. You've got in the background people setting fire to what I think are bales of hay to create smoke and stuff. And he said he'd seen two films growing up that influenced this shot. One was a film called Andrej Rublev by Tarkovsky.

Speaker 1:
[28:42] Oh, Tarkovsky's film about the icon painter.

Speaker 2:
[28:45] Yeah.

Speaker 1:
[28:45] Amazing film.

Speaker 2:
[28:46] And another film called Time of the Gypsies by Emilia Costa Rica. And he said, both have religious scenes of people floating down the river in the mist. I decided to do an homage to both films. I was also thinking a lot about Terence Malick's Days of Heaven.

Speaker 1:
[28:59] Oh, yeah. That's a brilliant film.

Speaker 2:
[29:00] And he says, if I were to choose a soundtrack for this shot, it would probably be Suave Sia Ilvento from Cozy Fantuti. So he goes on to also say that in those days, film stock, the film that people shot on was incredibly oversaturated. It was sort of artificially pumped with hyper colour.

Speaker 1:
[29:17] Right.

Speaker 2:
[29:17] And what he wanted was something that was under saturated. And he was really kind of experimenting with trying to make the colours a bit more muted.

Speaker 1:
[29:24] Yeah.

Speaker 2:
[29:25] And they had like tiny little lights to put a little ping in the model's eye and things like that.

Speaker 1:
[29:30] If you're only listening to this, you should definitely look at the newsletter or whatever, because the pictures are amazing.

Speaker 2:
[29:35] They just have this incredible kind of ethereal beauty to them.

Speaker 1:
[29:39] There's a timelessness to them, isn't there? Sort of. Well, I said they were retro and they are, but they feel like they're from the golden age of Hollywood or something.

Speaker 2:
[29:46] Right. Also, they were so modern at the time. You know, there was something about them when it's seeing them at the time back in the 90s, how, you know, this idea of having the budget to do some things that are so cinematic, but really taking cinematic techniques and resources and applying it to a still is kind of out there. You know, you're not even making a film, you're just doing one image, you're making pictures that look like film stills. He said in his email to me, an extra note, as I know Dominic has a special place in his heart for the US in 1968.

Speaker 1:
[30:18] We did a series on it.

Speaker 2:
[30:19] When I was growing up, we didn't have any art books, but my dad bring one time life to my work home, which I studied in great detail. Specifically one picture by time life photographer Bill Eppridge, his picture of Bobby Kennedy dying on the floor of the Ambassador Hotel kitchen. Looking back, it had a film noir quality, which I found alluring. The man in the picture unknown to nine year old me, the contradiction between Bobby's movie star looks in his black suit, yet stricken and obviously in great danger. I'm not sure why it stayed with me, but when I became a photographer, I began to unconsciously replicate it. My Prada pictures were definitely inspired by it. Years later, Bill Eppridge became my neighbour in Connecticut, and would come to lunch on occasion and we talked in great detail about this day. Bill told him that he and Bobby became good friends on the campaign trail, and he shared many anecdotes from that period. He said one thing was that during Bobby Kennedy, when he was making his speech.

Speaker 1:
[31:14] Yeah, the Ambassador Hotel in LA.

Speaker 2:
[31:16] Yeah. One of his aides whispered to Bill Eppridge, he's going to go out the front door, and wait for him by the front door. And then at some point later, someone went to Kennedy and said, actually, there's some donors in the kitchen that want to meet you. We've got to go out the back door and meet the donors on the way out. And that's when he was shot in the kitchen. Bill then goes storming back through the hotel. And it's Bill Eppridge that took that picture. And he said that although they had become great friends on the campaign, Ethel Kennedy never forgave him for taking pictures instead of helping. And she never spoke to him again.

Speaker 1:
[31:47] That's the issue that photographers always confront, isn't it? You're just a bystander chronicling, or are you going to intervene? And by and large, photographers don't intervene, do they?

Speaker 2:
[31:55] No.

Speaker 1:
[31:55] They're remit.

Speaker 2:
[31:56] So out of that comes this beautiful fashion imagery, which I would never have put the two and two together if he hadn't told me that. Right.

Speaker 1:
[32:04] Well, it's a reminder of how interlinked all these things are, I suppose. OK, so thank you very much, Chris. That was absolutely fascinating. Now, everybody, if you want to find out more, a reminder that you can find out more about the photos in our Super Sore Away newsletter. And a reminder that we will be back next week with the final episode in this tremendous miniseries when Chris will be talking about the influence of technology and photography and how that's changed the way that we view history. So on that bombshell, Chris, thank you very much and goodbye.

Speaker 2:
[32:32] Goodbye.