Turin, street photography and fashion star in CAMERA's double solo show

CAMERA - Centro Italiano per la Fotografia opens its 2021 exhibition season with a double solo exhibition dedicated to Lisette Model and Horst P. Horst, two important authors in the history of 20th century photography.

From April 28 to July 4, 2021, the public can visit the exhibitions Lisette Model. Street Life, curated by Monica Poggi, and Horst P. Horst. Style and Glamour, curated by Giangavino Pazzola: ironic and irreverent street photographer she and fashion photography genius he, landmarks in the development of their own photographic genre and sources of inspiration for entire generations. Both approached photography in Paris in the 1930s, but their way of making portraits is totally opposite: if for the Austrian artist the portrayed subjects become caricatures of themselves, symbols of an awkward and decadent society, for the German artist the models represent a timeless elegance, with classical references and statuesque beauty.

The exhibition dedicated to Lisette Model (Vienna, 1901 - New York, 1983) is her first anthological exhibition in Italy. Through a selection of more than 130 photographs, the exhibition traces the artist’s career, emphasizing her importance in the developments of photography in the 1950s and 1960s. Her name is often associated with her teaching period, during which she had as students several authors who would in turn become famous photographers, such as Diane Arbus and Larry Fink. In her shots she was able to capture the more grotesque aspects of postwar American society with irony and cheekiness. Close-up shots, the recurrent use of flash, and exaggerated contrasts are expedients designed to accentuate the imperfections of bodies, flamboyant clothing, and boisterous gestures. There is no interaction between Model and his subjects, caught tending to be sudden, while eating, singing or gesturing awkwardly, transformed by his shots into characters to observe and investigate. The street, the nooks and crannies of the Lower East Side and bars are for her the perfect stages on which unsuspecting actors in an irreverent human comedy act.

The exhibition begins in France, where Lisette Model began photographing in the 1930s thanks to the teachings of her sister Olga. During this period she made Promenade des Anglais, one of her best-known series, dedicated to the lazy and decadent bourgeoisie spending the summer vacationing in Nice, and chronicling the lives of Parisians spending their days on the city’s streets. After moving to the United States, he began photographing New Yorkers with a scornful and ironic gaze, producing some of his most iconic images. The exhibition also features lesser-known projects, such as the reportage dedicated to the Lighthouse in San Francisco, an organization that provides work and assistance to blind people, or the one made during the horse races in Belmont Park. The city is also present in the first series made soon after her arrival: Reflections and Running Legs, in which she is portrayed through the reflections created by store windows and through the legs of frantic passersby. Goods and buildings merge and blend with the people walking by, in a whole that is both surreal and documentary. There is also no shortage of shots taken inside jazz music venues, places where the true essence of the United States is found. Among the characters portrayed there are some of the greats of this genre, such as Bunk Johnson, Count Basie, Dizzy Gillespie, Bud Powell, Percy Heath, Chico Hamilton, Ella Fitzgerald and Louis Armstrong.
The exhibition is made possible through collaboration with mc2gallery in Milan, Galerie Baudoin Lebon in Paris and Keitelman Gallery in Brussels.

The exhibition Horst P. Horst. Style and Glamour unfolds chronologically and, through a selection of about 150 works of various formats, considers the main creative periods of Horst P. Horst (Weißenfels, 1906 - Palm Beach, 1999), tracing its history from its beginnings to its latest achievements. In fact, sixty years of the German-born fashion photographer’s career are traced: from his first successes with France Vogue in interwar Europe (1931-1939), through his establishment in the States, the land where he obtained citizenship (1943), to the end of his professional career in the 1980s.

The different sections emphasize certain highlights of Horst’s entire artistic production: the link with classical art, which, however, does not exclude the influences of the avant-garde; the visual investigation of the harmony and elegance of the human figure embellished by the perfect mastery of scene lighting; the fruitful and lasting collaboration with Vogue, a magazine for which the photographer has signed dozens of covers; the portraits of personalities from the world of fashion and art, often set in their own homes, images through which the author once again reveals his indisputable compositional skills.

The first section introduces the author and his research interests: the nature-culture relationship, the set portrait and the great attention to detail, elements found both in the photographs in which he immortalizes the intellectual milieu of 1930s Paris. In the second section, space is given to works made during his Paris and New York phases, very prolific periods influenced by Romanticism and Surrealism, during which he made iconic images such as Mainbocher Corset, Paris, 1939, and Hand, Hands, New York, 1941. The use of color in fashion photography opens the section of famous Vogue covers. Next on view are interior images made from the 1940s onward, which soon became one of the photographer’s main occupations, thanks in part to the interest of Diana Vreeland (editor of Vogue since 1962), who commissioned Horst to do a series of features on the homes and gardens of artists and celebrities. Among many made by the author, a focus is devoted to Italy, with the Roman apartment of artist Cy Twombly, adorned with his own works and classical sculptures, and the timeless charm of the Villar Perosa estate, inside which poses a very elegant Marella Agnelli.

Completing the exhibition, which moves among the artist’s best-known works and a series of surprising unpublished works, are images from the well-known series Round the clock, New York, 1987, the ultimate synthesis of the radicalism, talent and vision of one of the leading figures in 20th-century photography.
The exhibition is made possible through collaboration with the Horst P. Horst Estate and Paci contemporary gallery in Brescia.

For all information: www.camera.to

Image: Horst P. Horst, Mainbocher corset, Paris, 1939 (Madame Bernon, corset by Detolle for Mainbocher, Paris, 1939) © Horst Estate/ Condé Nast. Courtesy Paci contemporary gallery

Turin, street photography and fashion star in CAMERA's double solo show

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