ICONS OF STYLE A Century of Fashion

By Paul Martineau

Written by experts in photography and fashion history, this book is an essential book to learn bout Fashion Photography. Gathering over three hundred fashion photography images from the past hundred years, it is organized by key chronological eras with a parallel perspective on culture and society at the time. It includes images by the most influential photographers such as Cecil Beaton, Many Ray, Horst P horst, Louise Dahl Wolfe, Irving Penn, Lillian Bassman, Richard Avedon, Gyu Bourdin, Helmut Newton, Chris von Wangenheim, Bruce Weber, Herb RittsSteven Klein, Met& Marcus, Tim Walker, Scott Schuman and many more. It also introduces many important but lesser-known figures and includes delightfully detailed analyses of their works.

Foreword by Timothy Potts, Director, The J. Paul Getty Museum (extracts)

Long neglected by collectors and museums because of its commercial purposes, fashion photography is now recognized as having produced some of the most creative photography of the twentieth century, transcending its illustrative function to yield images of distinctive artistic quality. (…)

Art museums however have been slow to embrace fashion as the equal of portraiture, landscape, abstraction, street photography, and photojournalism, which have been assiduously collected and displayed for most of photography’s history. The time seems ripe to address this situation through an overview of the fines fashion photography of the past century that gives a historical perspective to the genre as a whole and provides the context in which its major achievements can stand out.