Thirty years ago, Madonna published Sex, a high-voltage sexual book -she accompanied the release of her album Erotica- in which the singer gave her vision of sex. There was barely any text ("Sex is not love. Love is not sex. But the best of both worlds emerges the moment they meet"), but included a powerful collection of photos in which she exposed her naked body in poses exciting together with "men kissing other men, women kissing women and myself kissing everyone", as she herself recalled these days on her Instagram account.The author of those images was Steven Meisel (New York, 1954). , a star photographer who had already signed the cover of her Like a Virgin and who shared the same taste for provocation with the queen of pop.
"My style is a bit scandalous, a bit crazy or sick when I'm allowed to do what I want," Meisel confessed on one occasion, for whom that job not only brought him millionaire income in his checking account - he sold a million and a half exemplary- but also "an open-mindedness that would allow him to work with absolute freedom from then on", says Jimmy Moffat, his assistant for forty years, the closest to a Meisel who has never wanted to lavish himself in the media and still today , at 68 years old, continues to crouch behind the spotlight. It has been Moffatt who has traveled to Coruña to present Steven Meisel 1993. A Year in Photographs, the exhibition that can be seen until May 1 in the old port of the Battery Dock in A Coruña that Marta Ortega had reformed on the occasion of a first Sample by Peter Lindbergh. The foundation of the president of Inditex, The MOP Foundation, wants to turn the center into an international benchmark for fashion photography. You are not short of allies.
The one in A Coruña is the largest exhibition of the North American photographer that has ever been held -he is reluctant to jump from the covers of fashion magazines to the exhibition halls- and is focused on the production of a single year, 1993, just after of launching the photobook in which Madonna displayed her sexual fantasies alone in or in the company of the model Naomi Campbell, the actress Isabella Rossellini and the rapper Vanilla Ice. As a preamble, in a mosaic of images that show her work prior to her prodigious year, we see a 32-year-old Madonna, naked and smoking, her gaze burning and challenging. In the next twelve months, Meisel would sign 28 covers and 120 magazine stories, mostly for the international editions of Vogue. "It's as if a musician had made 40 albums or a writer 30 novels. But you shouldn't be impressed by quality alone, but even more surprising is the enormous versatility of his work," says Moffat.
The name of Steven Meisel has often jumped off the glossy paper for his audacity (or bad taste for some) in posing his models in scenarios inspired by catastrophes such as the oil spill in the Gulf of Mexico, under violent gaze of soldiers during the Iraq war or eroticizing police violence (a military boot crushing the neck of a woman dressed in red...). But in a spectacular video installation that situates his work through a multiplicity of voices, what emerges is the profile of a passionate fashionista and, above all, the creator of the "supermodels" of the 1990s: Linda Evangelista, Naomi Campbell, Christy Turlington, Claudia Schiffer...
When he met them they were 15 or 16 years old. "He loved them, protected them and shaped them from their teens," Moffat recounts. "He was obsessed with the models. When he was 16 years old he would go with an Instamatic to the doors of the studios to stealthily photograph them when they left." Before being a photographer, he dreamed of them. And he ended up rising to the top of the profession. His background is graphic designer, something that will later influence a job where glamor and beauty are also part of a meticulous and surgically precise script.
The collected photographs, which are exhibited in large formats, belong to a world that is already distant, pre-digital, pre-Internet, pre-Instagram, a world that has now disappeared in which the sessions were almost exclusively run by Meisel. We see him in a video dressed in black, with long dark hair, also pointing out to the models how they should position themselves, how they should move ("beauty and elegance are in the pose", he considers) transforming them at will and creating for them new looks. Linda Evangelista, who once confessed that she had been amused to see how, at the age of 25, she tightened her skin with thread and surgical tape, we see her as soon as she is in a bathtub with her long legs shod in high boots, suddenly aged, so similar to Katharine Hepburn who makes you doubt, or upside down with her legs dangling from a fence next to a very young Kyle MacLachlan.
Evangelista, whose disfigured body caused by cryolipolysis keeps her away from public life, was the great absentee from an inauguration party, on Thursday, which brought Christy Turlington, Natalia Vodianova, Amber Valletta, Irina Shayk, to Galicia. Karlie Kloss or Naomi Campbell. The latter she remembered that "work was work but it didn't seem like it". And Moffat agrees: "For him, each session is a let's play, we're going to have fun, because he is convinced that the game is the purest form of creativity." A game that has been possible thanks in large part to the personality of Franca Sozzani, the director of Vogue Italia who for decades - something unusual in the world of fashion - has reserved her cover for him.
The exhibition is like a beautiful and nostalgic revival of the nineties, with a grounge that, under Meisel's gaze, contains all the glamor in the world, men who leave masculinity aside and show themselves in full color, sensitive and vulnerable; a world - from New York to the London countryside or the Paris Opera - inhabited by fascinating characters now long gone, such as fashion editor Issie Blow, muse and main model of hat designer Philip Treacy and patron of Alexander McQueen; Lucy Ferry or Lucy Ferry and Stella Tennant. For Marta Ortega, "some of the most relevant and powerful fashion photographs that have ever been taken."
