There was a long weekend devoted to fashion photography in Milano for the 2nd edition of Photo Vogue Festival with major exhibits: Fashion & Politics in Vogue Italia, the retrospective of Paolo Roversi’s work and a showcase for up-and-coming talent, scouted and supported through the Photo Vogue platform.
During this period a series of parallel exhibitions, talks and photography-related initiatives across the city transformed it into an ideal place for people passionate about photography. This effort was made possible thanks to the support of cultural institutions, photography schools and specialized galleries.
Organized by Vogue Italia, the Festival is an international meeting place for photography, art, culture and styling. According to Alessia Glaviano, senior photo editor of Vogue Italia, “the event is designed to gather all the people involved in these creative areas, in the various languages of fashion”. Photography can be experienced all-around. “There is a desire to meet with other people in some physical places to deal with issues connected with a common interest: photography. The Festival also offers the opportunity to meet in person key industry figures, renowned photographers and leading curators. The Photo Vogue Festival is also distinguished by being bound to an influential fashion publication and by the merging of multifold issues. And Vogue itself is a way of being,” Glaviano adds. Alongside two of the main exhibits, the Base Milano venue – a quite interesting site occupying a former industrial plant from the beginning of the 20th century – is hosting debates and initiatives. As Juliet Ash and Elizabeth Wilson (in Chic Thrills: A Fashion Reader) say: “Fashion photography has traditionally been regarded as the lightweight end of photographic practice. (It was considered) the transitory image par excellence.”
“Thanks to magazines like Vogue, to museum or galleries, we have new space to showcase fashion photography its primacy as an important cultural force (…) has been reinforced”, claims Nathaniel Dafidd Beard in his paper on The Changing Experience of Fashion Imagery. Indeed, while fashion is usually experienced as a playful, idealized and glamorous world, Vogue Italia has long ago understood that “fashion is a language: it is our visual interface with the world and we communicate our identity through it. Its natural channel is double: words, of course, and the more immediate images. Thus fashion photography can take us on a survey on the socio-cultural changes of a given time,” Glaviano says.
Furthermore, fashion involves millions of people and fashion photography often is also a concerned photography, as it happens in the exhibition entitled Fashion & Politics in Photo Vogue. It somehow mirrors Vogue’s peculiar role in commissioning an original “socially conscious” fashion photography, conveying messages and question to its readers. Indeed Vogue has been focused on commissioning contentious fashion photography topics for a long time, for instance when its then editor in chief, Franca Sozzani, published issues on pollution (with a model covered with feathers and oil) or against racism. The exhibit explores how fashion photography can commit itself to deal with issues such as wealth, gender, the environment, consumerism or identity building. The show includes images by Ellen von Unwerth, Bruce Weber, Steven Meisel, David LaChapelle, Miles Aldridge, Peter Lindbergh and Tim Walker.
Paola Sammartano
Paola Sammartano is a journalist specialized in arts and photography based in Milan, Italy. This exhibition is curated by Alessia Glaviano (who is also the Photo Vogue Festival director) and Chiara Bardelli Nonino.
Fashion & Politics in Vogue Italia
November 16 to 19, 2017
BASE Milano
Via Bergognone 34
20144 Milano
Italy
