“We were a generation of photographers that loved women because otherwise we would not have been able to do the fashion photography that we did.” This is how editor Peter Knapp summarizes the revolution that he and other photographers like Antoni Miralda led in the last half of the 20th century.
“In fact, to Hélène Lazareff, director of Elle magazine, what mattered most to her was that the photographer loved the woman and that he could show her intelligence, smile, cry, life, humanity...so more and more our photography becomes "He appropriated more of the woman," adds Knapp, who speaks to an audience that packs the Vicereine's palace in Barcelona. The round table, Fashion without flash, is part of the activities surrounding the Miralda and Elle exhibition, which allows you to discover the fashion photographs from the sixties that the Catalan Antoni Miralda took when he worked for Elle magazine in Paris.
Peter Knapp, fashion photographer and director of photography for Elle magazine during the 60s and 70s, managed to portray that new woman, willing to break glass ceilings that Lazareff was looking for and found great allies, such as Antoni Miralda, who at the beginning In the sixties, after settling in Paris, she began to collaborate with Elle and added her peculiarity to the demands of a time of incipient social changes in which there were also spaces for iconic moments in the world of fashion such as the arrival of ready-to-wear. porter. The two are together at the round table and show their complicity and closeness, which helped them radically change the way of taking fashion photographs.
Precisely, the colloquium delved deeper into this revolution of images, in which an account was also made of the changes that occurred in the 60s from a historical, social and cultural point of view and which were reflected through fashion, photography and , of course, at an editorial level. The round table, presented by the art historian and critic Josep Casamartina i Parassols, also included the participation of Joana Bonet, director of La Vanguardia Magazine, the graduate in art history Sílvia Rosés Castellsaguer, and Laura Casal, doctor in History of Art and fashion history specialist.
With her French accent and apologizing in advance for not speaking Spanish or Catalan, Knapp manages to immerse listeners in those years in which Hélène Lazareff wanted to move away from an elitist and bourgeois magazine and sought to work in an innovative way. “More than fashion photographers or specialists in Haute Couture, we decided to look for artists, reportage photographers who could grasp the movement, all that naturalness of any woman, one who did not work as an official model. “We wanted to make interesting images that went beyond photography, young, more natural, authentic photos,” she says.
Fashion photography would no longer be the same, but the paradigm of creating fashion was also changing, Knapp acknowledges and mentions André Courreges, a renowned designer of the time for his emergence in fashion shows with the pantsuit, for liberating the woman of corsets and popularizing the miniskirt and whom she ended up asking for help. “André is going to create a new image that was not that of the Haute Couture artist, who is working with the fabric, but of a person who is thinking about the practical life of a woman, who needs hands to be able to carry the bag or enter calmly in a car and with long, narrow skirts, she cannot do it easily and then she will create pants and completely eliminate gloves, she draws the future of the most practical fashion for women,” explains Knapp.
“As the paradigm of creating fashion changes, we also need different photography and that is going to give us a lot more freedom,” Knapp continues. “And that's when I met Antoni Miralda and we started collaborating with this type of photography. They were new ways of capturing the models, for example they posed on a tractor, a bridge, a ramp, that made me not only concentrate on the figure of the model or the person, but on the environment that this model contained.
Miralda's photography was part of this atmosphere of street effervescence. While most of the images, or at least the most stereotypical ones, used to represent the models in studios with the iconic postcard that focuses on the body, face and dress, Miralda began to photograph them in movement and outdoors, in a uncoded and therefore unpredictable space that, by turning the model into an 'urban flâneuse', generates that narrative counterpoint that turns her photos into artistic expression.
To delve deeper into that era, Miralda takes the floor and recommends seeing the exhibition “You will see four pages of Ella, the Spanish version of Elle, which showed a very rigid fashion. On the other hand, what was experienced in Paris was very different, there it was always a discovery for me. The cinema, May 68… Here with the Franco regime everything was very gray,” she says. The colloquium was also the occasion for Antoni Miralda to present the book Moda sin flash. Miralda and Elle, a catalog that shows all the unpublished work of the Catalan artist.
“And Peter Knapp was interested in experimenting, like me, in capturing moments with the camera and that was what he did in Paris,” says Miralda, born in Terrassa to a family in the textile sector that wanted him to study to continue the business. Peter Knapp was, according to Antoni Miralda, the editor who understood that “he could contribute another type of work, which created and provoked totally crazy situations, although he did not control everything, the result depended on many things, such as the reaction of the model . What he did propose to me was to reflect the artistic situation of the moment, the feminism of that time... a unique composition, a collage of images, to leave the studio and be as creative as possible.
Far from this change that was brewing in France, at an editorial level in Spain fashion was viewed superficially, without that cultural concept that crystallized in France, despite the explosion that occurred in the 80s, summarizes Joana Bonet. “Miralda was one of the first signs of modernity that I appreciated when I came to work in Barcelona and in 92 I set up the first fashion magazine, which was called Woman, but years before I was already working in newspapers making fashion pieces that ultimately They were cultural pieces, but due to prejudices, fashion was seen as something frivolous.”
Bonet points out two key moments in the evolution of fashion in France. The first is when the models are taken to the street and the human face is introduced into fashion, which was done in 1858 by the first couturier, Charles Worth, who went on to present his collections from the static mannequin to the flesh and blood person. that brings fashion with movement. “The second is a founding moment in fashion, it is the beginning of contemporary magazines; Peter has talked about Hélène Gordon Lazareff, a key personality, but also a little further on is Marcelle Auclair, the first director to direct Marie Claire and she is Lorca's translator in French, so you can see how frivolous the journalists who dedicated themselves to the fashion in France. Auclair in her first editorial says: 'Women, speak, express yourselves, if you don't do it, no one will do it for you,' Bonet develops.
“Miralda's creations - continues Joana Bonet - have always been like a medicine for optimism, which make us see beyond, with her cosmopolitan gaze she captures those accidents of reality and creates very beautiful compositions that also come out of sexualization. , with its images we understand well this tradition of fashion as an expression of knowledge and highlights the importance of fashion editorials to claim and read the evolution of women's emancipation."
The director of La Vanguardia Magazine celebrated the presence at the table of a historical art director like Peter Knapp and a multidisciplinary artist like Miralda, who opened perspectives and charted a new path. Bonet values that “when we look at the 60s we also realize that Elle does not sexualize women, that she is already a woman with short hair, with a line that does not come out of perfection, that she does not want that canon that does not allow her to walk to the woman, and that is why one of the first things that Coco Chanel is going to do is put pants on her and make a pointed skirt so she can walk.”
The specialist in fashion history Laura Casal highlighted the value of the other Paris, far from the tourist and photogenic city, which was shown in the photographs of Antoni Miralda and which can be seen on display in the Vicereina palace until October 1: “ They were images that had the objective of closing a story about fashion and that came to replace the figurines in magazines that began in the 19th century and that had drawings with explanations for those who wanted to copy those dresses through dressmakers because at that time At that time there were no fashion creators,” argues Casal.
For her part, Sílvia Rosés Castellsaguer, specialized in the history of haute couture in Spain, helped contextualize Miralda's photographs in a time of the emergence of counterculture in which “fashion yearns for freedom, for racial equality, for class and gender, and based on this generational fracture, it looks for dresses that represent those new segments of young people until reaching a process of infantilization of fashion, with stockings up to the knees, dresses that blur the silhouette of the woman, clothes broader, the liberation of the body, with a miniskirt that young people said that mothers did not dare to wear and, therefore, will definitely be a symbol of our generation,” concludes Rosés.
