Miles Aldridge Libros

Miles Aldridge is famous for his decadent colour-saturated fashion photography in magazines such as Vogue and Numéro, but the sensual sketches that inform his photographic work are scarcely known. Pictures for Photographs addresses this discrepancy by exploring the delectable relationship between the sketches and photographs. The book opens with the manic drawings with which Aldridge fills sketchbooks in preparation for fashion shoots. Scrawled in pen or pencil, these black-and-white sketches generate ideas for potential photographs and map out series of pictures like a film storyboard. Sometimes dotted with raunchy hand-written notes such as “green/yellow bra” or “painting nipples with lipstick”, Aldridge’s sketches are crucial to his photographs. The second half of the book presents Aldridge’s photographs, which are often as much about sex as they are about fashion. Here we experience the opulent onslaught for which Aldridge is known: a blonde woman eating lobster and caviar with an exposed breast, an erotic couple in a darkened limousine, a school girl surrounded by her teddy bears, and even crying Madonnas. By setting Aldridge’s monotone drawings and the amplified, Pop-inspired colour of the photographs against each other, Pictures for Photographs offers an as yet unseen insight into Aldridge’s imagination and working processes.

Please Please Return Polaroid is Miles Aldridge’s ongoing love letter to Polaroid, a process once integral to the craft of many photographers but now more or less extinct, apart from the rare and out-of-date material traded on eBay for exorbitant prices. The sequel to Aldridge’s Please Return Polaroid of 2016, this book presents new and vintage Polaroids from his more than 20-year archive in a seemingly random sequence shaped by a dreamlike logic and surprising juxtapositions. Please Please Return Polaroid explores Aldridge’s dedication to analogue processes where cut-and-paste is still a manual process, made with scissors, gaffer tape, intuition and not a little patience. Aldridge continues to use Polaroids as part of his work-in-progress “sketches,” often scratching, tearing and taping them together, even drawing over them; each mark part of the creative act. Known for creating immaculate photos of a less than perfect world, Aldridge revels in these unpolished images, transforming some into extreme enlargements filling double pages with their re-worked and damaged surfaces. Long live Polaroid!

In this book Miles Aldridge delves into his Polaroid archive — venturing back through twenty years of enhancing, modifying, reassembling and discarding. Many of these Polaroids were intentionally annotated or accidentally damaged while working on different shoots. Liberated from their original context, the images take on a life of their own by evolving into surreal and cinematic narratives. By enlarging and manipulating the Polaroids in unpredictable ways, Aldridge devotes himself to each Polaroid as an independent image while simultaneously learning to appreciate the importance of flaws and imperfections. This book provides us with a rare insight into a photographer’s odyssey; an unfolding journey of the imagination in parallel to his working process.

Other Pictures is Miles Aldridge’s surreal take on the traditional family album, and an autobiographical sequel to Pictures for Photographs (Edition 7L, 2009), in which Aldridge presented his fashion drawings and photographs. Other Pictures opens with seductive black and white images of Aldridge’s then lover, now wife, model Kristen McMenamy. Taken in hotel rooms after fashion shows from London to New York between 1994 and 1997, the photos are spontaneous and narcissistic, and show the young Aldridge investigating the medium of 35 mm photography as much as his unfolding romance with McMenamy. The second part of Other Pictures is an introspective portrait in deep colour of Aldridge’s married life with children. Cinematic and beautiful but filled with anxiety, these images show Aldridge’s children as vacant and sometimes corpse-like actors in the photographer’s imagined drama of family life. Miles Aldridge, born in London in 1964, has published his photographs in such influential magazines as American and Italian Vogue, Numéro, The New York Times, and The New Yorker. His work has been exhibited in numerous group shows, and his solo shows include those at Brancolini Grimaldi in Florence, Hamiltons Gallery in London, and Steven Kasher Gallery in New York. Aldridge’s work is held in the National Portrait Gallery and the Victoria and Albert Museum in London, and in the International Center for Photography in New York.