Face of Fashion

Any fashion photographer can make a flattering portrait, but the contemporary masters featured in "Face of Fashion" don't even try. This striking, gold-embossed, faux-leather-bound volume presents the intensely unconventional, often unnervingly intimate portraiture being made by some of today's most creative and original fashion photographers--including Corinne Day, Steven Klein, Paolo Roversi, Mario Sorrenti and the team of Mert Alas and Marcus Piggott. Each photographer is represented by a range of portraits, including several commissioned especially for this book. Some of the portraits were produced for ads; others were commissioned for editorial features. Many of the subjects are celebrities, including Kate Moss, Madonna, Matthew Barney, Brad Pitt, Angelina Jolie and Sting. Others are completely anonymous. Essays by Susan Bright and Vince Aletti illuminate the collaborative nature of this radically new approach to portraiture, as well as how it diverges from earlier work by masters like Cecil Beaton, Irving Penn, Richard Avedon and others. In addition, candid descriptions of the process by the photographers and subjects themselves provide rare insight into the potent mix of fame, fashion and photography on view here. Copublished with the National Portrait Gallery, London, to accompany the exhibition there.