Vanity Fair Portraits: Photographs 1913 – 2008
National Portrait Gallery, Canberra
5 June - 30 August 2009
This is the first exhibition to bring together rare vintage prints with contemporary classics from Vanity Fair and the legendary Condé Nast Archive. The exhibition is a photographic history of celebrity portraiture, including the works of master photographers such as Edward Steichen and Cecil Beaton, Annie Leibovitz and Mario Testino. The National Portrait Gallery is the sole venue in Australia to host this travelling exhibition. Vanity Fair Portraits: Photographs 1913 – 2008 is a collaboration between Vanity Fair and National Portrait Gallery, London.
In Vanity Fair's first period (19131936), celebrated subjects such as Albert Einstein, Charlie Chaplin and Jean Harlow are shown in portraits by legendary photographers, among them Edward Steichen, Cecil Beaton, Baron De Meyer, Man Ray and Australian-born Anton Bruehl, a pioneer in colour photography. From the magazine's re-launch in 1983, the works of photographers including Annie Leibovitz, Helmut Newton, Bruce Weber and Mario Testino are featured, depicting a wide range of subjects, from Arthur Miller to Madonna.
Vanity Fair Portraits presents a rare opportunity to see definitive portraits of the 'Jazz Age', including now classic studies of Louis Armstrong, Josephine Baker and Noël Coward. The selection of portraits also includes two previously unpublished and unseen 1928 studies: Florence Vandamm’s portrait of actress Alice White and Emil Bieber’s rendering of German artist George Grosz.
Although Vanity Fair suspended publication in 1936, it would be resurrected in another period of decadence and excess, the 1980s. Once again, its purpose was to record modern men and women of culture, stature and talent and as in the early period, portrait photography was the graphic bedrock of the magazine. In the tradition of editor Frank Crowninshield (who ran Vanity Fair from 1914 to 1936), the revived monthly commissioned the world's leading portrait photographers, among them Helmut Newton, Nan Goldin, Herb Ritts, Harry Benson, Mario Testino, Jonathan Becker and Bruce Weber.
Vanity Fair's iconic photographs continue to make news. Since the magazine's re-launch in 1983, cover images including the Reagans dancing (1985), a very pregnant Demi Moore (1991), a formal portrait of President Bush's Afghan War Cabinet (2002) and most recently actresses Scarlett Johansson and Keira Knightley photographed naked (2006) have been embedded in the collective cultural consciousness.
Annie Leibovitz has become the dominant image-maker of Vanity Fair, just as Edward Steichen dominated Vanity Fair's first period. Edward Steichen (1879-1973), who created an unrivalled gallery of portraits of the dominant personalities of the 1920s and 1930s, has a worthy successor in Annie Leibovitz and Vanity Fair Portraits is the first major exhibition to display their works together.
“We are very pleased to be able to present this exhibition to Australian audiences. It fits perfectly with our interest in celebrity, style, of-the-moment people and, of course, the work of great portrait photographers. A particular feature of the exhibition season at the National Portrait Gallery is the inclusion of a number of Australians who have made it on the world’s stage. Like all of the subjects in the exhibition these Australians have been captured with that mixture of flair, originality and incisiveness that is a unique quality of Vanity Fair”, said Andrew Sayers, Director, National Portrait Gallery, Canberra.
NATIONAL PORTRAIT GALLERY
King Edward Terrace, Parkes, Canberra, ACT 2600
