The work of fashion photographer and artist Miles Aldridge is thrust into the limelight this summer, as Somerset House hosts a major retrospective of his work.
Show I Only Want You to Love Me coincides with the publication of the book by the same name, and is the largest exhibition of his work to date.
Including large scale photographic prints from throughout his career including previously unpublished material as well as hand-drawn storyboards, drawings, polaroids and magazines, the show will offer an intimate insight into Miles’s point of view and process.
There is no doubt what Miles’s twin obsessions are – women and colour. His work is filled with glamorous, beautiful women from dazed housewives and decadent beauties to sunbathing sexpots and ecstatic Virgin Marys.
Luscious colours dazzle from every image – blood red ketchup splashes against a black and white floor; a mouth drips with gold; egg yolk oozes across a plate. But the technicolour dream world of seemingly perfect women with blank expressions belies a deeper sense of disturbance and neurosis.
Look more closely and there is silent screaming, a head pushed down on a bed, a face covered in polythene, a woman pushing an empty swing.
Born in London in 1964, Miles studied illustration at Central St Martins, and briefly directed music videos before becoming a fashion photographer in the mid-’90s. He has published his work in many influential magazines including Vogue Italia, American Vogue, Numéro, The New York Times and The New Yorker.
His work was showcased in Weird Beauty at the International Center for Photography in New York in 2009, and he has works in the permanent collection of the National Portrait Gallery, London and the Victoria & Albert Museum, London.
His work has never been constrained by the demands of the fashion world. Working like an auteur filmmaker, his view of the world is wide and deep. His many influences include film directors such as David Lynch and Federico Fellini; the styled elegance of fashion photographer Richard Avedon and the psychedelic illustrations of his father, Alan Aldridge. Each image is immaculately crafted, often starting with story-board drawings so that the final image lies somewhere between cinema and photography.
l Miles Aldridge: I Only Want You to Love Me is at Embankment East Galleries, Somerset House, Strand, London, until September 28. Details: somersethouse.org.uk