Pictures for Photographs [2009]

Pictures for Photographs by Miles Aldridge [2009]

New in Publisher's Shrinkwrap.
Hardcover in Slipcase; 176 pages
Edition 7L
6.2 pounds; 15.6 x 1.1 x 11 inches
3865218415

The notorious fashion photography of Miles Aldridge weds dream logic to opulent velvet glamour. His colors are saturated in the vein of David LaChapelle; among his portrait subjects, it's unsurprising to find David Lynch, bathed in the projector's light, a godfather to Aldridge's appetite for spotlit scenarios of beautiful people engaged in dark misdoings. These staged scenarios have been seen in such magazines as Vogue and Numéro, but the sensual sketches that inform them are scarcely known. Pictures for Photographs explores the relationship between the sketches and the photographs, opening with the manic drawings with which Aldridge fills sketchbooks in advance of shoots.

Scrawled in pen or pencil, these black-and-white sketches generate ideas for potential photographs and map out series of pictures like a storyboard. Sometimes dotted with handwritten notes such as "green/yellow bra" or "painting nipples with lipstick," Aldridge's sketches are of course crucial to his photography. The second half of the book presents Aldridge's photographs: a blonde woman eating lobster and caviar with a breast exposed, an erotic couple in a darkened limousine, a school girl surrounded by her teddy bears and crying Madonnas. By juxtaposing Aldridge's monotone drawings with his amplified, Pop-inspired photographs, Pictures for Photographs offers new insight into Aldridge's imagination and working processes.