Blink of an Eye: Deborah Turbeville

When I was a small fry, there was nothing I loved more on a Saturday afternoon than to go with my dad to the library. He, me and my sisters had this routine: we'd have gymnastics, swimming and dance classes at the Y in the morning, and then we'd all go to the library and check out books for the week. (And afterwards we'd all go to Osco Drug and buy lemon drops, which remain, decades later, my still-favorite candy of all time.) After loading up on books, I used to head to the magazine section and page through all the "grown-up lady" magazines, which included of course Vogue. (I used to read Cosmo, too, but mostly the weird, almost-romance novel-ish fiction they'd publish, which always fascinated me because they had these very Charlie's Angel-like heroines who had romantic problems that were absolutely incomprehensible to me.) I didn't get Vogue at all as well, but I liked the shiny paper and the shiny pictures and all the perfume inserts that I used to rip open and smell, much to my parents' consternation. (They were big on library manners.)

These days, Vogue seems dominated by a sort of picto-catalog style of photography (lots of girls jumping around in coats and stuff) but I remember the Vogue of my childhood having way more different visual styles: people on yachts (like Duran Duran's "Rio"!) and strangely tense people wearing swimsuits on city rooftops and stuff like that. And I distinctly remember being about 8 or 9 and being riveted by this weirdo set of pictures of women wearing impossibly gorgeous clothes, lounging around in a steam room, of all places. It confused me: why weren't they floating around in a garden or some luxurious bedroom? The pictures evoked a very strange place -- vaguely out of the past, vaguely European, a highly romantic place where the strange things that happened to strange girls in fairytales could actually occur with any degree of probability. To a kid just starting to read about Paris and artists and "the avant-garde," this was all very exciting.

Since then, I have become a totally seasoned Vogue reader, for better or worse. And I found out that the photographer of those "steam room" photos was Deborah Turbeville, and I also discovered that they were a very famous set of photos in the history of fashion photography. Turbeville has serious credentials -- she started off working for Claire McCardell at the age of 20 and was an editor at Mademoiselle and Harper's Bazaar before she became a photography. I still love Turbeville's work, even though it's a little harder to find. (She seems to shoot mostly for Vogue Italia now -- probably the most visually innovative international Vogue around now.) I stumble upon her images every now and then when I'm at airports looking at the international editions of all the magazines, and they still have the ability to startle me and make me dream of places that don't really exist, except in my half-remembered wishes and desires.

Blink of an Eye: Don't Call It a Comeback? Gwyneth in W...

I'm simultaneously intrigued and repulsed by the Gwyneth Paltrow cover and editorial in the September issue of W. The editorial is like a weird mashup of Steven Klein's photographic brilliance with a weird Gwyneth-as-Stepford-Wife-meets-blowup-doll character, only the dolly's a little broken, as witnessed by the cane and crutches. (Granted, I think Gwynnie recently had knee surgery, so I like how they just rolled with it.) What with the mouse ears and beige lipstick, I feel like I've stumbled upon a strange David Lynch interpretation of a Harmony Korine screenplay, and it certainly gives the "lady-lady" clothes throughout a directional gloss.

In the Blink of an Eye: Elinor Carucci

We've loved the work of Elinor Carucci ever since I caught her show last fall at Houk Gallery right here in New York and fell in love with her intimate, beautifully composed photography. There's something about the saturated, melancholy lighting and the close scale of her work that is suffused with a sort of loving yet abstract tenderness, as if the image is already elegiac and existing within memory already. (It's the same quality that I love about most of Wong Kar-Wai's films.) The Israeli-born Carucci has been infiltrating the fashion magazine world lately, with editorials appearing in places like W, Jane, and Paper, where she recently shot Chan Marshall for the cover story. Despite whatever place her images turn up, the people she photographs always look incredibly human and fully gorgeous without needing too much adornment, fuss or feathers -- and who doesn't love that?

In the Blink of An Eye: Ryan McGinley and Kate Moss for W

Between causing a commotion with her Topshop line, continuing her bad-girl antics with musician and fuckup Pete Doherty and finding other new and interesting ways of mucking up scandal, sometimes I almost forget that Kate Moss is a great model above all else. Which is why you need to check out the editorial she shot with the insanely talented Ryan McGinley for W in their June 2007 issue (the one with Naomi Campbell on the cover.) Those down with the art scene in New York have known of McGinley for awhile now, what with being a wunderkind and all -- youngest artist to ever have a solo show at Whitney, that sort of thing. Whether he's photographing couples making out, young boys skateboarding, or friends camping, there's a sort of abstract intimacy he brings to his lens that makes his images oddly joyful and tender. He does no different with Kate, and the result is ethereal and just so beautiful.

In the Blink of an Eye: Martina Hoogland Ivanow

You've probably caught Martina Hoogland Ivanow's work in such magazines as Dazed and Confused, The Face and Another Magazine, and she's lensed campaigns for Prada and Miu Miu, among others. The Swedish-born photographer has a sensuous eye, drenching her images in warm, saturated colors and a certain softness that is romantic but tinged with a moody darkness that we love. There's an almost mystical edge to her work that isolates the clothes presented in their own serene reality - fashion should always be so beautiful.

Madonna in W + Horses = Wowza

Everyone's talking about it, but the Madonna/Steven Klein editorial in W is pretty stunning, especially if you adore horses like us and have worshipped Madonna since forever. We're sort in scary awe of the musculature of her back, but it seems to fit well with the fearsome steeds, slight Goth and S&M overtones and sheer power of the images.

Our favorites:

In the Blink of an Eye: Anette Aurell

I don't know much about Anette Aurell, but what I do know is that I love her relaxed, natural sensibility. Whenever I see her photos in i-D or Nylon, I'm always struck by their offhand grace and casual feeling, especially when she shoots in outdoor settings. When so much fashion photography strains to be directional or edgy to the point of actually being generic, Aurell's work always manages to have an ease about it - to me, one of the most beautiful qualities ever.

In the Blink of an Eye: Mark Borthwick

Mark Borthwick's photography has been lighting up all sorts of stops in the "alternative" fashion publication world, with editorials in Purple, Self-Service, Nylon, i-D and Italian Vogue, and he's done campaigns for Adidas, Vanessa Bruno and Yohji Yamamoto, among many, many others. His name's often in the same sentences with the likes of Sonic Youth (he's done some of their album artwork, most notably for A Thousand Leaves), Cat Power (he shot and directed her Warholian "performance film" Speaking for Trees) and downtown designer Maria Cornejo (they're married). And to top all that, he writes and does music as well. It all adds up to absolute cool and high influence, but it's well-earned: Borthwick's photos have a wonderfully physical, decentered treatment of fashion, almost as if it existed in the peripheral vision of his casual, relaxed, offhand world where people live and move to the rhythms of the street, not the runway.

In the Blink of an Eye: Corinne Day

I was digging up some old stuff the other day and came across some old issues of The Face from waaaaay back in the early 1990s, easily one of my most favorite periods in international pop culture. I used to obsessively hunt out those British style magazines from that time period, and even today, a quick glance reveals the images and fashion produced around then to be as quietly oppositional to the usual notions of glamour that still proceed now, with a certain spirit of celebrated imperfection. British photographer Corinne Day was one of the vanguard photographers of the time period, with a certain grittiness and casual documentary quality that recalls artists like Nan Goldin, and it wouldn't be overstating it to say that without her, Kate Moss wouldn't have embarked on her path to becoming one of fashion's icons. Back then the images were embroiled in the heroin chic/waif debate, but I'm sort of struck most by how youthful everyone seems, and an evanescent quality of melancholy imbues it all. Anyway, in honor of the creeping return of Nineties influence in fashion, one of my favorite photos by Day: