PHOTOGRAPHY BY HIROSHI SUGIMOTO Imagine you’re standing in the last row of an empty theater, gazing at the screen while a movie is being shown. Now, take a photograph. Could anything be simpler? Would anyone call it “Art?” In 1976, when Hiroshi Sugimoto—an unknown graduate from Tokyo of Pasadena’s Art Center College of Design, newly…
Ask anyone in fashion what makes a major campaign different today from what it was twenty years ago, and the first word they usually say is, “time”. . . . How there would be a couple of days to think, talk, and plan. Four days for shooting instead of one. And then, after the shoot…
It is now after midnight in Paris. Peter Lindbergh the photographer and I have been talking for much of the day. He is home. I am in New York. We’ve discussed his early interest in becoming a conceptual artist (and making “big” paintings before that). Silent German cinema and Berlin cabaret have been topics of…
In the beginning, there was only one Valentino. Not Valentino of the startling but stylish screaming red cocktail dress. But Mario Valentino, the son of a Neapolitan cobbler who made elegant bespoke shoes for Italy’s King. Both had shrewdly mounted their conquest of America early in the 1960s by personally cultivating and gaining patronage from…