Lara Stone PH: Inez van Lamsweerde and Vinoodh Matadin for Purple

2008. Two years to go before we'll be obliged to start discussing 'The Tens' but already my circle of friends, or at least the misbegotten ones who live their lives as dedicated followers of fashion have started to worry the big theme: "Who defined this decade?".Which designer? (In that circle, a chorus of "Nicholas Ghesqueire...Balenciaga went up in near unanimous fashion ). Which magazine was most on the pulse? (The candidates were Pop, V, Self-Service and Carine Roitfeld Vogue Paris with Sozzani's recent sizzling Vogue Italia making a late break for the title) Which stylist swung the most power in an era of heedlesly powerful stylists (Grand vs Templer is the showdown there).
The question that brought dinner to a standstill however was which photographer? Which photographer emitted the imagery that you'll most associate with the years 2000-2010? Because the nature of photography changed so radically from the grainy and deliberately down market tonality of the Grunge 90's to the super-synthetic and hyper-real visuals people now paint on their computers, some punters ventured Mert and Marcus. They get the credit for the overkill of retouching that is the standard today. What started out as self-conscious irony and reference to Old Hollywood hard glamour has now trickled down to Lucky covers. Ours is a time of hard, plastic women in a field of fantastic and unlikely colors. Mistakes or mis-shoots are 'corrected" by computer. The product takes precedence with the model being amde to have less presence than the handbag.
But then their are the Meiselists who insist that hard, lacquered , plastic woman made disposable and anonymous have become his great evolution. Those tended to be the business minds in our group and they embraced the business edge to Meisel's image production. No-one working they claim, has that perverse eye. Its a perverse eye for details, for casting, for colour, for poses, props, concepts, hair, make-up, clothes . With the aid of the computer Meisel, it may be argued has finally come to live out his Warholian factory ambition. Pumping out a production line of editorials and campaigns that are as much industrial machine as it is mass-market art. His is the imagery, they argue, of a time of hedge fund excess and super-celebrity.
The sentimentalists put a bid in for Inez and Vinoodh, for their spanning of diverse worlds. Their mastering of the complex nuances of the photography world today is set to give their back catalogue of work the cultural resonance needed to for it to stand the test of time. The conceptual art gallery gamemanship hinged to the sex-sell. The emotional quality of their portaraiture balanced against the slight, subtle and seductive manipulations of the computer that made the portraits a little less "real" is what give them the edge it is held. Art still matters in an era of artifice, those defenders argued and the originality as well as the shrewdness of their work makes them the natural inheritors of Avedon's legacy. Personally, I like that there is still skin apparent in their photography and I'm not being arch, given the picture of Lara Stone heading the post. By skin I mean that I like that their is still a human being palpable and breathing in those pictures. Its a cliche yes, but were I to venture to buy a print of a contemporary fashion photographer..they'd clinch my downpayment.
Well the proposition of Mert n Marcus, Steven Meisel and Inez and Vinoodh is bound to spark differing perspectives. Which one do you think owned the Zeroes?