In the picture • Shifting perspectives in fashion photography

Due to the uncertainty of social distancing measures and the general Covid—19 situation the fifth edition of the Photo Vogue Festival (PVF), organised by Vogue Italia will be mainly digital. A never seen before platform will host the exhibitions, talks and projections.

Excerpts of the exhibitions will also be displayed outdoors from October 30th until November 22nd, in the Giardini di Porta Venezia in Milan, to allow the community to interact with the works. The full exhibitions will be browsable online starting November 12, and the live events, talks, zoom parties and portfolio reviews will populate the same platform from the 19th to the 22nd of November 2020.

As every edition, the Festival will be a unique opportunity for those interested in photography, fashion and art to come into contact with a showcase of innovative photography and industry leaders, from curators to practitioners.

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If any image is inherently political, so is the act of choosing and displaying them. Fashion photography is a layered and complex art form, a dream factory that is more and more predominantly the preferred stage where collective identities are played and created. With this in mind we decided to introduce for the 5th edition of Photo Vogue Festival a novel way of examining and exploring the current fashion photography panorama, by initiating a dialogue among four of its most brilliant minds.

Alexandra von Fuerst, Camila Falquez, Nadine Ijewere and Ruth Ossai are all “contemporary socially conscious fashion photographers”. They are part of a new generation of artists whose aesthetics is intrinsically a hybrid of genres: in their images, fashion engages in a constant dialogue with visual arts and journalism, as well as with an introjected need to balance out the various levels of representation. The work of Alexandra, Camila, Nadine and Ruth, is imbued with issues of gender, race, womanhood, without ever being didactic or redundant - on the contrary, it is glamorous, vibrant and powerful.

They are four artists working in an industry – fashion – that is undergoing a profound journey of self-reflection and they are not mere bystanders observing the change but rather part of the main driving force.

For PVF 2020, we decided to give space to their vision, initiating a 4-way dialogue where the artists are not only the protagonists of the exhibition but also its curators.

The photographs in the exhibition, as well as the sequencing and main themes explored are therefore the result of a collaborative creation between Alexandra, Camila, Nadine and Ruth, through zoom calls, whatsapp chats and shared dropbox folders. As the curatorial process in this particular case is inextricably part of the artistic process, the exhibition will include excerpts of the dialogues between the artists.