Harper’s Bazaar Greatest Hits: Book Launch & Exhibition Opening

Patrick Demarchelier, Stephanie Seymour  (Harper’s Bazaar, February 2002)

In the ten years since Glenda Bailey became Editor in Chief of Harper’s Bazaar, she and Creative Director Stephen Gan have carried on the magazine’s tradition of publishing innovative, high-impact photography. Harper’s Bazaar: A Decade of Style on view at the International Center of Photography (1133 Avenue of the Americas at 43rd Street) from September 9, 2011, through January 8, 2012, distills that decade into a choice group of nearly thirty images by some of the most important photographers working today. To emphasize the work’s original context and the magazine’s award-winning design, the exhibition will include several vitrines with issues open to display extended stories alongside the striking covers, swept clean of cover-line text, that are sent to Bazaar’s subscribers.

Photographers in the exhibition include Peter Lindbergh, Jean-Paul Goude, David Bailey, William Klein, Patrick Demarchelier, Terry Richardson, Camilla Akrans, Sølve Sundsbø, Mark Seliger, Tim Walker, Mario Sorrenti, and Karl Lagerfeld. The magazine has also regularly featured artists who are not usually associated with fashion, so Nan Goldin, Ralph Gibson, and Chuck Close are in the mix, along with two photographers who have a long, legendary history at Bazaar, Hiro and Melvin Sokolsky. In addition to inventive fashion images in a wide range of styles, from classic to cinematic, there are vivid portraits of designers Marc Jacobs, Karl Lagerfeld, and Diane Von Furstenberg, and celebrities, including Daphne Guinness, and Lady Gaga.

Patrick Demarchelier, Carmen Kass  (Harper’s Bazaar, November 2001)

“Fashion magazines have always considered it an important part of their mission to combine art and commerce,” said ICP Guest Curator Vince Aletti, who organized the exhibition. “Harper’s Bazaar has a particularly distinguished history of hiring great photographers, printing important writers, and training a keen eye on the arts.” “Fashion reflects what’s going on in our world, and Bazaar makes pop culture fashionable,” said Bailey. “This exhibition is the culmination of a decade in a new world where every popular phenomenon comes with a fashion spin.”

Terry Richardson, Lady Gaga (Harper’s Bazaar, May 2011)

Under Bailey, Bazaar has been especially alert to shifts in the culture, casting Ellen DeGeneres as a successful presidential candidate in one wish-fulfilling fashion feature and imagining the second chapter in the life of an abruptly downsized female exec in another. Photographers are encouraged to borrow freely from the wide world of pop, so Seliger is inspired by iconic shots of Barbra Streisand for his black-and-white portraits of Jennifer Aniston, Demarchelier casts Stephanie Seymour as a Warhol superstar, and Julianne Moore looks like she stepped out of a John Currin painting in Peter Lindbergh’s witty transformation.

An accompanying book, Harper’s Bazaar: Greatest Hits collects these alluring, lively, and humorous visions into a single volume that celebrates the best of Bazaar from 2001 to 2011. It is available in the ICP store and online at www.icp.org/store .

Contact: Communications Team 212.857.0045 info@icp.org

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Is it just me, or are we all collectively obsessed with food, diets, eating, body image, and body weight? We ended the year dishing (sorry about the pun) about unhealthy and unnatural skinniness, debating the issue of what constitutes ‘too thin’ (vis-à-vis models and the fashion industry), talking about eating disorders, diets, exercise regimens, losing weight, gaining weight, sharing festive recipes, reading about food, planning our menus, thinking about our next meal, and contemplating what restaurants to visit.

And here we are, just several days into the New Year, and it continues. Many of us have made resolutions to lose weight, tone up, get into better shape, and of course, eat healthy. The cover of New York Magazine boasts “Adam Platt’s Where To Eat: The Best Restaurants in Town”. But it seems some of us are not eating but starving,‘dying’ to be thin, and as a whole, we are generally as obsessed with what we eat as what we don’t eat. Which is not a good thing. Not only from an appearance standpoint but in terms of health, it can be downright dangerous. The headline of AM New York on January 2 was “Rail Thin” (“Women on crash diets fainting are a top cause of subway delays, MTA staffers say”), an alarming statistic that was also confirmed by an article that ran in The New York Post on Wednesday, January 3.

In Bernadine Morris’s interview with James Galanos for the Look On-Line (“A Conversation with James Galanos”), she asked him about the current controversy today regarding whether models are too thin: “Mr. Galanos says he always liked thin models. Pat, his fitting model, was very thin and there was a problem getting other models who could fit into her clothes. The problem today, he believes, is that designers use models who are too young and who have not reached their maximum development. He certainly doesn’t believe models should starve themselves, and that gangly legs can look terrible in clothes.” Indeed, but there are plenty of gangly arms and legs out there…on the Red Carpet, on the street, on the runways and staring up at you from editorials in magazines.

This brings up another point. I have always felt that to a certain degree, what constitutes as “too thin” can often be subjective, a matter of taste, and an aesthetic call. (I happen to be very thin so what I consider to be too thin may differ from someone else’s point of view). That said, the January issue of Harper’s Bazaar magnified the reality that in some cases, it is not subjective, but in-your-face obvious.

Perhaps because the issue of unhealthy and unnatural thinness has been so much on all our minds, with the fashion world trying to regulate and uphold certain universal standards for models which must be met, I was immediately struck by images of a young model, who appeared throughout the portfolio “Highlights from Milan”, photographed by Daniel Jackson. While on some of the pages, clad in voluminous layers or covered up designs, she just looked ‘normally’ skinny (well, normal in terms of fashion models), in the images where her body was exposed (three shots in particular), she appeared to be shockingly emaciated. She was literally skin and bones, with rail thin arms and legs, and protruding collarbone. And, when you factor in that the camera adds at least 5 pounds, you may be unable to put your finger on something or know exactly what “IT” is until you see it — these photos exemplified “IT”. Indeed, a picture is worth a thousand words.

– Marilyn Kirschner

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