After a Fashion: Classic, Humorous, Subversive

The Stephen Daiter Gallery offers its first ever, fashion-oriented exhibition. The fifty or so photographic works by over twenty artists, span seven decades and have been very carefully selected to represent a variety of views on the subject – from some thought-provoking images (including one by Carrie Mae Weems) involving the introduction and induction of young girls to the world of beauty and fashion, to Robert Heinecken’s heretical inversions of magazine spreads – undermining the very pictures he so carefully presents. In between are some of the classics, including Victor Skrebneski’s, Vanessa Redgrave (the 1967 portrait that put him on the fashion world’s map) – Herb Ritts’ famous profile of the sultry Madonna, and Helmut Newton’s capture of a stunning and scowling Paloma Picasso. Sandro Miller offers an affectionate and respectful look into an alternative fashion universe, with gleaming studio portraits of heavily tattooed and leather-clad bikers. Kenneth Josephson adds his trademark offbeat touch – providing not only photographs of his model but all the clothes that she had been wearing, as well. And here and there are some pictures (like Art Shay’s nocturnal portrayal of a forlorn patron of a beauty salon looking quite out of place as she peers out from under a beehive hairdryer – framed in the camera’s eye by several perfect if lifeless heads of available hair) that lightly jab at the whole notion of vanity, and remind us not to take ourselves too seriously…all in all a helluva fun show!