He’s heard it often : Hans Feurer is named after fire (“Feuer” is German for fire). The bodies he photographs are glowing landscapes.
The girls he captures have smouldering looks. Models, famous or unknown are devilishly sexy. Flames encompass his work.
Heads of blazing hair, Feurer never wishing to extinguish them. Since the early 1960, this man with a passion for Africa and travels pursues the idea of fashion photography as the tracking of a wild animal. Clothes are skin as light as the feathers of a bird with impressive panache. Images are not arrested but suspended, expressions are captured reflecting seriousness or affront. The beauty of women is his territory. It is also no-man’s land, in which he – since leaving the Swiss art school decades ago – searches endlessly for borders. Hans Feurer has gotten us used to give an iconography to the names in fashion, he has successfully lassoed. We remember models like Iman or Sayoko full of life, captured in images he created for Kenzo. Also, we recall photos where silhouettes are submerged in landscapes kissed by harsh sunlight or sunsets.
It’s certain that Hans Feurer is an explorer of nature, who seeks to liberate the coveted. It is not so much the kinds of fashion he aims to capture in his nets, but the bodies of women, voracious or rejecting. It is these liberated curves that he has knowingly glorified over decades, mapping out their movements and their infinite grace – a territory we will never completely know.
Olivier Saillard, Director of Palais Galliera, musée de la mode de la Ville de Paris
EXHIBITION
Exposure by Hans Feurer
September 16th – September 26th 2015
Mead Carney Fine Art
45 Dover Street
Mayfair London, W1S 4FF
UK
