Jul 31

Jul 31 MILES ALDRIDGE

Art, Creative People, Culture, Fashion and Design, Photography

Miles Aldridge’s saturated photography draws on cinematic glamour and a range of influences, including David Lynch, Fellini, Avedon and 60’s psychedelia.

Aldridge’s museum exhibitions include his retrospective Virgin Mary. Supermarkets. Popcorn. Photographs 1999 – 2020 at Fotografiska, New York, solo shows at The Lumiere Brothers Photography Centre, Moscow (2019) OCA, São Paulo (2015) and I Only Want You to Love Me at Somerset House, London (2013). He also collaborated for twenty years with legendary fashion editor, Franca Sozzani at Vogue Italia, and his works belong in the collections of the National Portrait Gallery, the British Museum, the ICP, and Fondation Carmignac. His fascination with art history led him to undertake projects with contemporary artists including Maurizio Cattelan, Gilbert & George and Harland Miller.

I was fed up looking at all the pictures in fashion magazines showing beautiful women having a beautiful time. They irked me. It was the early 2000s, when I was just starting out, and fashion was a kind of chocolate box universe, totally bullshit and phony. If you read the newspapers, you knew life and the world were not like that.
I always wanted the women I photographed to be more like the people I knew: edgy, desperate, destructive, dangerous, demented. This image was part of a series called Red Marks, shot for Italian Vogue in 2003. I wanted to see how far I could push things and get away with it.
I asked myself the question: how to shoot a beauty story without a girl in it? Where would lipstick be left behind? A cigarette was an obvious place. Other images in the series were an apple core and a cup of coffee that had been knocked over. There are cinematic references in my work, from Alfred Hitchcock to David Lynch, and I remembered a wonderful scene in Hitchcock’s Rebecca where a matronly lady stubs out her cigarette in a tub of cold cream. It was a great image of contempt and disgust. I thought: how can I evolve that?
My father [the illustrator Alan Aldridge] was a psychedelic whizzkid. He introduced me, at an early age, to a broad range of imagery – from pop art to religious imagery and comic books. From my childhood, too, I remembered the work of Michael English, and I wanted this photograph to feel like one of his meticulous, airbrushed hyper-realist close-up paintings of objects like Coke bottletops.
We went through about 36 eggs for this shot – we had them cooking on a little Calor gas stove in the studio. I kept getting the prop stylist to crack and cook them, have a look at them, and if they weren’t right, we did it again. They were the cheapest eggs we could get from the corner shop and the smell in the studio was like old farts. - From a 2015 interview in the Guardian.

Recently, Aldridge’s vernacular of noir beauty is emphasized through the screenprinting process, which allows a new heightened colour, as well as a print texture nostalgically reminiscent of pin-up magazines and pulp fiction book covers.