A fiercely original photographer, Miles Aldridge is best know for the technicolor dream-like worlds he creates and the glamorous, beautiful women who inhabit them. Aldridge creates ultra-cinematic images, drawing inspiration from film directors such as David Lynch and Federico Fellini as well as from the psychedelic graphic design of his father, Alan Aldridge.
Aldridge’s photographs often depict women in haute-Stepford mode splashed with lurid candy colors. He captures his subjects in a state of dramatic contemplation, making them more complicated and intriguing than simply beautiful. As Glenn O’Brien describes, “Miles Aldridge constructs dreams. He understands the essential ingredients of the dream and he use impeccable instincts in crafting the fragmented narratives an exquisite tapestry of right and wrong [defying] our waking order of things, our expectations and sensibility.”
Born in London in 1964, Aldridge studied illustration at Central St Martins, and briefly directed music videos before becoming a fashion photographer in the mid-90s. He has published his work in many influential magazines including Vogue Italia, American Vogue, Numéro, The New York Times and The New Yorker. His work was showcased in Weird Beauty at the International Center for Photography in New York in 2009, and he has works in the permanent collection of the National Portrait Gallery, London and the Victoria & Albert Museum, London.
Marilyn Manson said about his work : “Miles Aldridge is a director at heart. Each photograph has a very scared pathology to every angle and obsession to detail. There is genius in the very deliberate blankness on the face of the models that enables a transference of identity. He always draws you into an arrest fetish that seems as forbidden as a little girl’s diary.”
EXHIBITION
The Age of Pleasure
March 13 – May 24, 2014
Christophe Guye Gallery
Dufourstrasse 31
8008 Zürich
Switzerland
