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Steven Meisel is, with out query, probably the most influential style photographers strolling this Earth at the moment. He as soon as shot 28 Vogue covers in a single 12 months. He found Stella Tennant. He formed the visible language of Italian Vogue for many years.
And but, the American nearly by no means reveals, by no means posts on social media, not often offers interviews and has printed little or no. He is, paradoxically, each omnipresent and invisible. Which makes his new present, Photo London: Steven Meisel: Master of Photography, really feel like fairly the occasion.
It’s one of many highlights of Photo London 2026 within the UK, the primary at its new dwelling in Olympia. Every 12 months, this prestigious honest awards its Master of Photography accolade to a major determine – and this 12 months, Meisel will get the dignity.
Co-founder Michael Benson, who’s labored with him earlier than, describes his settlement to exhibit as “a rare and special thing”. That’s an correct assertion of how not often this photographer permits his work to be seen on a gallery wall.
London angle
The focus of the exhibition is a particular physique of labor: Meisel’s portraits made in London in 1993, specifically the Anglo Saxon Attitude sequence shot for British Vogue with the late Isabella Blow.
Coming off the again of his collaboration with Madonna on her 1992 e-book, Sex, Steven arrived in London with one thing to show, and with a collaborator in Blow who had an instinctive radar for unconventional magnificence.
The outcomes, as anybody who’s ever flipped via a Nineties Vogue archive will know, have been merely extraordinary.
Importantly, Steven didn’t rent a pristine West End studio. Instead he worked in alleyways in Spitalfields, along canal towpaths, in the docklands, and on the streets of Notting Hill and Portobello Road.
He put Vogue fashion assistant Plum Sykes on a table in a silver bikini, in a crowded London pub while the regulars watched soccer. These weren’t locations chosen for their glamour; they were chosen for their friction, their texture, the sense that the real city is pressing in on the frame.
The tension in his portraits stems precisely from that collision: high-fashion styling against authentic, earthy settings. The point was to deconstruct, to be disruptive, to resist the expected polish of the fashion image.
Steven’s own explanation is characteristically brief and direct. “I think I’m good with discovering people, whether or not they are a model,” he has said. “I see things in them that they might not see.”
That instinct is evident in his London work. Stella Tennant, who became one of the defining faces of Nineties fashion, was essentially a society girl from Blow’s address book. Steven saw something that the industry hadn’t yet noticed.
That quality, the ability to find a subject’s specific potential rather than impose a generic idea of attractiveness or elegance onto them, is one of the toughest skills to develop in portrait photography.
It requires patience, close looking and a willingness to cast against type. Steven’s London portraits are a practical demonstration of all three.
The pleasure in these pictures, though, isn’t just functional or historical. Decades on, they still look startlingly alive. These aren’t mere period pieces, but studies in how a confident photographer brings together location, subject and light into something that will never age.
They’re instructive precisely because Steven makes it look effortless, even though it clearly wasn’t.
For more information, visit the Photo London website.
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