Met up with a stylist/fashion-ed yesterday for lunch and we were talking work; work work work: what’s new, what’s good, what’s fresh…you get the idea.  She told me to look at Miles Aldridge‘s work.  Not exactly a new name, but I’m thinking, the guy who shoots shiny for NYTimes mag?  She responds, yeah maybe, but look at his stuff, digital wah!, which I know you’re not into, but it’s fucked up, which I know you are into.  True and true…for the most part.

Given the post, I obviously did check out his work and obviously liked it.  I mean, how to make a watch sing:

photo: Minuit, Paradis, 2007. ©Miles Aldridge.

Now that’s not so much twisted as more digestably erotic, excellent nonetheless.  If you shoot sexy in fashion you’re pretty much coming from one of two similar but also disparate schools.  Newton, who made for a confluence of the erotic and style. Or Bourdin, who did the same with eroticism and discomfort.  Aldridge’s lineage is more of the latter.  The difference is that Bourdin’s work tunneled below the image to something more troubling.  There was an honesty to what he did, and much of his work then manages to transcend a sexually disquieted idea to a palpably troubling psychological event, to something that approaches the sick, but subtly so. (Not to say Aldridge’s work is superficial or dishonest, not at all, rather maybe I’m just pointing out in a round about way it’s contemporary traits.  Suggesting the possibility that our current culture may be more reserved and commercial than, say, the 1920s or 1960s in some manners.  We often associate the past with simplicity and a pietist nature and the the present with the opposite…consider that possibly we like to give ourselves undue credit in these regards, while culture and history ebb and flow.)  Old news though, as I’ve hashed Bourdin here before, as countless have elsewhere.

photo: for Vogue magazine, ©Guy Bourdin Foundation.

But, if you want to see some actual footage of him, which is as rare as anything, someone emailed me this show (in eight short parts) last week of Rankin recreating some classic work.  My first thoughts on the shows was a not getting the, why, but then I guess it’s for TV so that makes overall futilities excusable.  Never mind that though, b/c I think it’s worth a watch for the superb old footage alone…or for David Baily.

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