The Selects Gallery was founded in February 2018 in New York City as a platform to discover, learn, and acquire art photography from the world’s best fashion photographers.
The gallery was born from the desire of founder Marie Audier D’Alessandris to give a second life to these images sleeping in archives and in many cases forgotten after the original photoshoot.
Marie is a French-American married to an Italian and the mum of 2 boys, living in New York City after several years in Latin America. Throughout her career as a global Fashion and Beauty executive, Marie was privileged to work with some of the most talented photographers in the industry, along with their teams of makeup artists, hairdressers, and stylists.
She always thought that the talent and budgets required for creating such images were not commensurate with their short lifespan, as the majority get archived after being published in a magazine for a month. She also realized that most Fashion photographers are more interested in the creative process of shooting rather than the management of their archives.
She thought of this as total artistic waste.
When a CMO at Coach she intimately witnessed the major shifts in the media world and realized that we would all be soon nostalgic about these incredible images that populated major glossies.
Marie felt the urge to give these extraordinary images a second life with The Selects gallery by combing through the archives of the most iconic past and present beauty and fashion photographers to unearth their hidden gems.
The Artists:
In this quest, The Selects Gallery exclusively features the work of photographers highly respected by the fashion industry but lesser-known by the general public:
- Renowned contemporary Fashion and Beauty photographers who continue to work very actively such as Kenneth Willardt, Sylvie Castioni, Greg Lotus, Paul Bellaart, Emmanuelle Hauguel, or Richard Phibbs.
- Iconic photographers of the late ’70s, ‘80s, and ‘90s:
- Andre Carrara, whose timeless images became a cornerstone for Marie-Claire France and Marie-Claire bis in the 1980-2000.
- Giovanni Gastel, the nephew of Luchino Visconti and one of the most famous photographers in Italy
- Rose Hartman and her famous Studio 54 pictures which are been exhibited at the Brooklyn Museum
The Selects Gallery is also the first gallery to work with the estate of Chris von Wangenheim and show his work for the first time in 40 years at Art New York art fair in May 2019.
The photographer Chris Von Wangenheim radically challenged the public taste with high fashion photographs capturing the zeitgeist and cultural changes of the ‘70s. Despite being called “the terrible threes” along with Guy Bourdin and Helmut Newton, his images have remained largely unseen since his tragic death in 1981.
