As a 12-year-old in New York, Steven Meisel minimize college to hang around at pictures studios, fascinated by folks and the way in which his digital camera might maintain them. One of his earliest pictures was of Twiggy, newly arrived within the metropolis and never but an icon. In 1993, he would {photograph} her once more; the picture now hangs on this 12 months’s Photo London Master of Photography exhibition, of which Meisel is that this 12 months’s honoree, with a present constructed round his first skilled engagement with a metropolis he has lengthy been obsessive about.
His capability to search out, after which carry into focus, one thing in an individual that exists simply past strange trying is what has made Meisel essentially the most prolific and least seen style photographer of his era. In a single 12 months, he produced 28 Vogue covers, but he has revealed simply two books and had solely a handful of public exhibitions, by selection. He doesn’t communicate within the press, and he has no social media presence, all of which heightens the sense of event round this exhibition.
“Steven’s agreement to present a group of London portraits is a rare and special thing for the fair,” says Michael Benson, co-founder of Photo London and curator of the Meisel exhibition, who beforehand labored with Meisel on a present for the Amancio Ortega Foundation in Spain and describes persuading him to exhibit once more as one thing of a coup. The choice and sequencing of photographs remained firmly in Meisel’s palms all through, “Even down to the night before we opened,” Benson recollects. For Meisel, the work is course of and fervour as a lot as product, saved on shut guard, and completely his personal.
The centrepiece is Anglo-Saxon Attitude, a sequence Meisel shot for British Vogue with Isabella Blow, who forged it from her circle of London society women. Among them: Stella Tennant, Honor Fraser, Lady Louise Campbell, Bella Freud – who has since summarised the spirit of the shoot as “you had to deconstruct your manners and be as rude as possible” – and Plum Sykes, photographed standing on a pub desk in a silver bikini whereas jaded punters watched the soccer. Shooting throughout east and west London alike, Meisel made portraits of a metropolis that was anarchic, humorous and unbothered by the thought of being checked out. “As a Londoner, you get the references in the places he’s chosen,” says Benson.
The sequence was made on the again of the Sex e-book with Madonna, the primary undertaking that had given Meisel weeks somewhat than days to work, and which had despatched him into his most prolific period. “It was the last really great set of classic portraits he made,” says Benson, “before he started getting involved in very big production numbers.” These photographs had been made earlier than the keystrokes of social media – the caption, the tag, the remark, the share. Meisel’s pictures have all the time stood utterly on their very own; each a whole, dimensional world held in a single static body – no small factor in an age of picture overflow, the place so few pictures minimize by means of the noise in any respect.
At the opening, Bella Freud and Honor Fraser returned to provide a chat and stand in entrance of the portraits by which they seem – photographs made once they had been barely adults, in a metropolis that hardly resembles the one outdoors. Photo London has its personal inflection level to reckon with, having just lately moved from Somerset House to Olympia. “We are at the beginning of a new era,” says Benson. “He was at the beginning of an era where no one knew exactly what was going to happen.”
Steven Meisel: Master of Photography is on present at Photo London till 17 May 2026.
