MILES ALDRIDGE
Miles
Aldridge
Saturated. Cinematic. Dangerous. The photographer who made fashion look like a David Lynch film.
"I was fed up looking at all the pictures in fashion magazines showing beautiful women having a beautiful time. I always wanted the women I photographed to be more like the people I knew: edgy, desperate, destructive, dangerous, demented."
Here is another incredible talent I briefly got to work with at Vogue Italia in the late 90s. As someone who loves cinema and is inspired by strong visual identities, his work has always been immediately recognisable. That recognisability is something I have always advised photographers to cultivate when representing them. Miles Aldridge has it completely: you know his image the instant you see it. Saturated colour, cinematic staging, women lost in thought or on the edge of something. Nothing quite like it in fashion photography.
Born in North London to illustrator Alan Aldridge, a pivotal figure in the psychedelic aesthetic of the 1960s, Miles grew up surrounded by creativity and celebrity. John Lennon was a family friend, as was Eric Clapton and Elton John. He studied illustration at Central Saint Martins, then spent several years directing music videos for The Verve, The Charlatans and Catherine Wheel before settling into fashion photography in the 1990s. The path from illustration to music video to fashion photography is legible in every image he makes: each frame is composed, directed and lit like a film still.
His twenty-year collaboration with Franca Sozzani at Vogue Italia produced some of the most formally ambitious fashion photography of the 2000s. Sozzani gave him the freedom that only she gave: to push, to disturb, to make images that irked the comfortable. His work belongs in the collections of the National Portrait Gallery, the British Museum, the ICP, and the Fondation Carmignac. He has photographed Viola Davis, Michelle Yeoh, David Lynch, Donatella Versace and, in 2024, Elton John for TIME's Icon of the Year cover. The arc from Vogue Italia in 2003 to that TIME cover is one of the most consistent careers in contemporary photography.
"Fashion was a kind of chocolate box universe, totally bullshit and phony. If you read the newspapers, you knew life and the world were not like that."
Miles Aldridge · On the early 2000s fashion worldA fashion shoot without a model · Red Marks, Vogue Italia, 2003
I asked myself: how to shoot a beauty story without a girl in it? Where would lipstick be left behind? A cigarette was an obvious place. Other images in the series were an apple core and a cup of coffee that had been knocked over.
There are cinematic references in my work, from Alfred Hitchcock to David Lynch, and I remembered a wonderful scene in Hitchcock's Rebecca where a matronly lady stubs out her cigarette in a tub of cold cream. It was a great image of contempt and disgust. I thought: how can I evolve that?
My father was a psychedelic whizzkid. He introduced me, at an early age, to a broad range of imagery: from pop art to religious imagery and comic books. I remembered the work of Michael English, and I wanted this photograph to feel like one of his meticulous, airbrushed hyper-realist close-up paintings of objects like Coke bottle tops.
We went through about 36 eggs for this shot. We had them cooking on a little Calor gas stove in the studio. I kept getting the prop stylist to crack and cook them, have a look at them, and if they weren't right, we did it again. They were the cheapest eggs we could get from the corner shop and the smell in the studio was like old farts.
It was part of a series called Red Marks, shot for Italian Vogue in 2003. I wanted to see how far I could push things and get away with it.
of Fame
"At its core, 15 Minutes of Fame is about how people want to be seen, and who they become when they're given permission. More often than not, the version they leave with is closer to the truth than the one they arrived with."
An ongoing series of Polaroid portraits: a democratic mix of public figures and complete unknowns. Each sitter steps into the studio, photographed against a pleated orange backdrop, under theatrical lighting, with a curated selection of props from his universe: telephones, popcorn, cocktail glasses.
The idea came after photographing Elton John for TIME's Icon of the Year cover. That shoot, staged like a set of photobooth snapshots, got him thinking: what happens when anyone, not just a celebrity, is given their moment in the spotlight? The result is a pop-tinged homage to August Sander and Andy Warhol, filtered through his own hyper-stylised, cinematic lens.
Over the course of fifteen minutes, he works spontaneously with each sitter to create a fictional version of themselves. He shoots on Polaroid because it's immediate, with just the right amount of irreverence. Perfect for capturing flashes of humour, vanity, drama, and surprise. Each portrait is a unique, unrepeatable record of the sitter's fifteen minutes in front of his camera.
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Miles ALDRIDGE (*1964, Great Britain)
Mannequin Thriller #2, 2013
Chromogenic print
77,5 x 111,5 cm (30 1/2 x 43 7/8 in.)
Edition of 10,
Miles ALDRIDGE (*1964, Great Britain)
A Family Portrait #13, 2011
Chromogenic print
111,6 x 111,6 cm (43 7/8 x 43 7/8 in.)
Edition of 10, plus 2 AP