Unlike many photographers who like to be at mass and ringing, photographing and at the same time being the stars, Steven Meisel (New York, 1954) is little friend of spotlights and flashes. He has not been able to avoid them in A Coruña where his work, or more specifically the work he carried out in a specific year, 1993, has been seen by more than 100,000 people, a very respectable number for a city of 245,000 inhabitants. .
The exhibition, now in its last days (it will remain open until May 1) is the second to be organized at the BaterÃa Dock and run by the Marta Pérez Ortega Foundation, the president of Inditex. The first exhibition, which also received a considerable number of visitors, was dedicated to the late photographer Peter Lindbergh. From Lindbergh, Taschen has reissued all of his catalogues, including Untold stories, which gave the exhibition its title.
Together with Meisel, Lindbergh was one of the architects of the creation of a universe that raised brilliant models to a special Olympus and the birth of the top models, whose names everyone knows. Linda Evangelista, Carla Bruni, Naomi Campbell, Claudia Schiffer, Amber Valletta…
The retrospective, the largest ever dedicated to the American photographer, is entitled Steven Meisel, 1993 and includes the work of this master of photography during that same year, which was decisive in his career, and which was marked by his close collaboration with Vogue, a magazine with which he signed 28 covers and more than 100 editorials.
Meisel is an enigmatic and somewhat mysterious man. His work is very well known but very little (or considerably less) about his life, in the style of writers, also Americans like him, Thomas Pynchon or J.D. Salinger (although these are much more reclusive). It is clear, however, that he is obsessed with design and beauty, with drawing: “My good taste in design comes from illustration,” he declares in the original exhibition catalogue: a very well-published Magazine in the that each page is a reprint.
The sixties and seventies were the showcase in which everything changed in fashion and how to photograph it. Also the emergence of a protest cinema and of an art that was going to jump from the museum and the gallery, to the street, either on the walls or in the New York subway trains. Polaroids had their moment of glory. The young Meisel skipped classes and went looking for curious people on the street and photographed them.
Madonna, who is part of that landscape of the late seventies in New York and whom Meisel photographed, recalls in the catalogue, interviewed by Vogue: “Steven came with a vision. He had investigated. He had very specific references. He had. I respect a lot the care he put into his work, the way he approached it”.
Naomi Campbell, also photographed by Lindbergh and image of the poster for the first show at the Battery Dock in A Coruña, sums up Meisel’s doing and wanting: “Steven makes you feel beautiful, like a chameleon, as if you could play any character you imagine. It taught me to be a blank canvas.”
