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SELECTED EXHIBITION 
from the archives

2016

DAVID SEIDNER

David Seidner exhibition, Galleria Carla Sozzani, Milan 2016

Now that we are temporarily closed we will continue to share online content, exhibitions, interviews, videos from Fondazione Sozzani archives over the coming weeks.

In 2016 Carla Sozzani Galleria presented for the first time in Italy an exhibition by David Seidner, one of the leading fashion photographers of the 80s and 90s.The show, featuring exhibition prints by the International Center of Photography, included a body of fifty photographs that traced his photographic research in its constant oscillation between fashion, portrait and art history.

Born in Los Angeles in 1957, at seventeen he moved to Paris to work as a fashion photographer. By nineteen, his pictures were appearing on magazine covers and his collaborations with the fashion world would start to deepen. The earlier images document the couturiers Azzedine Alaïa, Chanel, Madame Grès, Jean Patou, Ungaro and Valentino. In 1980 he worked exclusively for two years with Yves Saint Laurent. David Seidner prematurely passed away in 1999 at forty-two, leaving a body of work that testifies to his personal survey on photography and art history, what he considered his "philosophical perspective."

Robert Mapplethorpe, 1980 ca.  © International Center of Photography, David Seidner Archive

Davide 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.

In 1977, Seidner had been hired by the Los Angeles Times to do a portrait of John Cage. While trying to correct the distortions of the photo lens, he shot five different angles of Cage's body. This was a transformative moment in which Seidner realized the strength of composition of his subjects presented with these fragments when combined into a complete image.

Taya Thurman, Mme. Gres, 1980  © International Center of Photography, David Seidner Archive

“What I’m most interested in is evoking the spirit of a painting through the fold of fabric, the position of a hand, the quality of light on skin.” David Seidner

1986 found Seidner shooting for the Musée de la Mode in Paris photographing small wire mannequins dressed in mini-measure suits from the great couturiers of the time: Balenciaga, Jacques Fath, Lucien Lelong, Elsa Schiaparelli and Pierre Balmain who had created the miniatures after the war to promote French fashion in the USA. Seidner portrays them in poor, semi-abandoned sets, almost to recreate the echo of bombed buildings and the war.

Lips, 1988 © International Center of Photography, David Seidner Archive

A deep interest in the past, in the history of art, and the art of portraiture brought Seidner closer to the study of the paintings of John Singer Sargent. In the Nineties, initially for Vanity Fair, he traced the descendants of the subjects painted by Sargent, especially British and American aristocrats, 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. 

The Fondazione Sozzani was established in 2016 by Carla Sozzani and is dedicated to the promotion of culture through photography, fashion, fine and applied arts. The Foundation has assumed the patronage of Galleria Carla Sozzani and continues all relevant public functions that the Galleria has supported for the past 30 years. 

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