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“For advertising, you have to find the balance between your style and the product. “When you have all the freedom to show what you want, it is art,” von Unwerth says. Sokolsy’s nonconformity even delighted Diana Vreeland in 1960, who found the artist’s location choice of a ruined tenement provocative and convinced Harper’s Bazaar to publish the photographs, despite an editor’s remark that the average reader would not identify with “a hovel.”įor both artists, the distinctions between fashion photography for editorial, commercial, and artistic ends are largely insignificant.

“Melvin has told us about his encounters with the French police while making these photographs,” Fahey said. Sokolsky’s whimsical fantasy amounted to models suspended above the River Seine in giant translucent orbs. Sokolsky’s images weave memorable stories to which scores of photographers have paid homage, most notably the artist’s “Fly” and “Bubble” series for Harper’s Bazaar in the early 1960s. “I found myself attracted to beautiful upper-class women whose body language and clothes were foreign to me,” Sokolsky explained. Sokolsky first encountered fashion photography as a teenager on the streets of New York, where he’d wander from the Lower East Side to midtown capturing images of high-society women.

“Ellen understands that by simply being a female photographer, she can extract a different kind of erotically charged image.” “Ellen’s idea of women both embracing their sexuality and their feminine beauty has become her signature style,” says gallery owner David Fahey.

Her work with the circus and as a model inspired von Unwerth to step behind the camera and translate her experiences into erotically charged, theatrical photographs.

This weekend, Los Angeles gallery Fahey/Klein opened a dual exhibit presenting photographs from seminal moments in Von Unwerth’s and Sokolsky’s careers. Ellen von Unwerth and Melvin Sokolsky, two of fashion photography’s most surreal figures, create intense and emotional images that challenge the way we think about beauty and femininity.