David Seidner

Corso Como 10, in Milan, features an exhibition on David Seidner, one of the leading fashion photographers of the 80s and 90s, with prints form the International Center of Photography, including fifty photographs that trace his photographic research, oscillating between fashion, portraits and art history.

Born in LA in 1957, at seventeen he moved to Paris to work as a fashion photographer. By the age of nineteen, his pictures were appearing on magazine covers and his collaborations with the fashion world started to deepen. His early photographs document the work of couturiers such as Azzedine Alaïa, Chanel, Madame Grès, Jean Patou, Ungaro, Valentino and Yves Saint Laurent.

A deep interest in the past, in the history of art, and in the art of portraiture brought him closer to the study of John Singer Sargent’s paintings. In the Nineties, initially for Vanity Fair, Seidner traced the descendants of the subjects painted by Sargent, especially British and American aristocrats from the XIX century, and portrays them in the sumptuous costumes of their ancestors. With the Sargent series, these large-scale works seamlessly combine contemporary color photography with the conventions of the genius of the late-nineteenth-century portrait painters Sargent and Ingres.

Seidner continued throughout his career to use the techniques of fragmentation, dynamic lighting, and cropping he had begun to explore earlier. The music of John Cage, the composer of aleatoric music and the author of Music of Changes inspired much of Seidner’s aesthetic research. In these works, the face or body of the model is visually cut up and collaged together through multiple exposures, reflections in pieces of mirror, or by chemical manipulations in the printing.

from 4 September to 1 November 2016
opening Saturday 3 September, at 20.00
David Seidner
Corso Como 10
Milan