Pictures for Photographs

The Steven Kasher Gallery is honoured to present Miles Aldridge: Pictures for Photographs. The exhibition will include over 25 large scale color photographs as well as a selection of the artist’s sketchbooks and drawings. It will launch the artist’s monograph Miles Aldridge: Pictures for Photographs (Editions 7L/Steidl, 2009). This is Aldridge’s first solo U.S. exhibition.

Miles Aldridge’s images depict a stupendously glossy and magnetically vibrant world with ultra slick, hyper-lit models, signature acid tones, and mysterious narratives.

Cinematic expression marks Aldridge’s work; his dream-driven, erotic style has been compared to Bergman, Bunuel, David Lynch, and Hitchcock. Aldridge is first of all an artist of the subconscious, secondly a fashion photographer.

Aldridge’s photographs are as much about sex as they are about fashion. We experience the opulent onslaught for which Aldridge is known: a blonde woman eating lobster and caviar with an exposed breast, an erotic couple in a darkened limousine, a school girl surrounded by her teddy bears, and even crying Madonnas. Pictures for Photographs explores the delectable relationship between Aldridge’s drawings and photographs.

Scrawled in pen or pencil, the black-and-white drawings generate ideas for potential photographs and map out series of pictures like a film storyboard. Sometimes dotted with raunchy hand-written notes – such as ‘green/yellow bra’ or ‘painting nipples with lipstick’ – Aldridge’s drawings are crucial to his photographs. By setting Aldridge’s monotone drawings and the amplified, Pop-inspired color of the photographs against each other, Pictures for Photographs offers insight into Aldridge’s imagination and working process.

Aldridge is one of the artists highlighted in the current ICP exhibition Weird Beauty: Fashion Photography Now (Open through May 3, 2009). His photograph Spot the Fake #1 was the signature image of the show, featured on the ICP brochure and website, and in the coverage in the New York Times, the New Yorker and elsewhere.

Aldridge, born in 1964, lives and works in London. His work has been exhibited in exhibitions worldwide, with pieces residing in many significant public and private collections. Aldridge has published several books of photographs, most recently: The Cabinet, 2007, with an introduction by Marilyn Manson, Acid Candy, 2008, with an introduction by Glenn O’Brien, and Miles Aldridge: Pictures for Photographs, 2009.

James Gager, Senior Vice President/Creative Director, M·A·C Cosmetics Worldwide will host an exclusive dinner in honor of Miles Aldridge’s exhibition. M·A·C Cosmetics has a long-standing relationship with Aldridge as they have collaborated on nearly every beauty image for the brand over the past 5 years.