The photographer José Manuel Ferrater explains his first meeting with Naomi Campbell this way: “My meeting with her was magical. It was a shoot and she arrived scared. She knew that she is tremendously tough, that if she doesn't like what's happening or how you're photographing her, she just leaves. I set up a white light corridor for her and did not give directions from her. So she asked me what do I do? I took some kind of shawl that was lying around and said "you hit me" and she was stunned at first but then she started laughing and hitting me with the foulard starting a run around the studio.
A seduction game that lasted all day and ended with the take she asked me to do. Dancing a rap on top of a podium in a miniskirt and me, on my knees, recording the video. The next day my agent told me that Naomi had asked her if I was gay. When he told her no, she replied: 'I would like to have a child by that man.' A wonderful woman".
The most rabidly vivid images of Naomi Campbell, Claudia Schiffer, Cindy Crawford, Valentino, Monica Bellucci and the Ferragamo sisters…. and Nadal or Gasol. More than 200,000 photographs and filming (from between 1971 and 2022). Almost always portraits of real women. feeling. Smoking. "Disjointed with laughter." And always in black and white. That is the legacy that José Manuel Ferrater (Barcelona, 1948), one of the most international fashion photographers of all time, has recently sold to the Ministry of Culture for the Museo del Traje collection.
This is how his journey from the sordid, underground and defiant to the most optimistic and hooligan that builds his extensive collection of photography (always in fashion) has found, in Ferrater's own words, "the best of all possible homes, a rationalist building with its amazing gardens, and with all the legacy of Rabanne, Balenciaga, McQueen…”
50 years have passed and Ferrater, who in Eina received the tutelage of Miserachs, Ràfols Casamada, Guinovart, Umberto Eco and even Gabo... (he entered the first promotion after collecting an insurmountable collection of zeros in a course in Agricultural Engineering), At 74, he continues to define himself as a fashion victim who has been lucky enough to see the entire recent history of fashion parade before his lens. And to capture with her expressionist gaze the probably most fascinating moment of all. That era of the supermodels of the nineties for which Elite invented a name, that of top model, and a definition "that model that the public outside the field of fashion can recognize and name as if it were a brand". .
His attachment, or rather obsession, with fashion has led him to be one of a kind with his own recognizable style. “I am (in my photography, painting and poetry) a radical expressionist. They are sometimes hard photos that perhaps now would not be well seen or not even published. Background at home? His career military grandfather, polyglot and crazy about culture Manuel de Lambarri, who was the cartoonist for Vogue Paris in the twenties. You would be surprised to know that the fashion victim grandson who did not fit into the family sold his file on December 28 (the same day that the acquisition of Berlanga's legacy was closed) for 200,000 euros.
