By Cynthia Tomasini

Last night The Photographers' Gallery (the U.K.’s first independent gallery devoted to photography) previewed Fashion in the Mirror: Self-Reflection in Fashion Photography.  This body of work is curated by Michel Mallard and Raphaëlle Stopin, organizers of  the annual International Fashion and Photography Festival in Hyères (www.villanoailles-hyeres.com/hyeres2008).

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The exhibition exemplifies the Gallery’s commitment to showcasing international photographs and broadening the boundaries between art and fashion.

The birth of fashion photography as the visual representation of glamour, seduction and dreams took place within the photographer’s studio. The post World War II period saw a new breed of fashion photographers venturing out of their studios in search of more realistic, alternative locations. More recently, notably in the 1990s with its championing of the so-called ‘grunge’ style, the fashion photograph has persisted in trying to shake off its image of being purely decorative.

The photographers in Fashion in the Mirror seek their subject matter within rather than beyond their own field. The works in the exhibition deconstruct the image-making process and lay bare the basic principles of the fashion photograph; the way it is staged, its artificiality and the notion of ‘perfect beauty,’ finding both comedy and poetry in the set-up of the studio. The exhibition will present an overview of this self-examination and an intriguing look behind-the-scenes from the 1940s to the present day.

The exhibit features work by twenty-one-world renown photographers, including Grégoire Alexandre, Richard Avedon,  Terence Donovan, Steven Klein, William Klein, Nick Knight, Inez van Lamsweerde & Vinoodh Matadin , Saul Leiter, Steven Meisel, Helmut Newton, Norman Parkinson Harri Peccinotti, Irving Penn, John Rawlings, Bob Richardson, Melvin Sokolsky, Bert Stern, Juergen Teller, Mario Testino, Jonathan de Villiers and Tim Walker.