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Vanity Fair photos featured at London's National Portrait Gallery
2008-02-13
Charlie Chaplin will rub shoulders with princess Diana, Madonna and Americans presidents past and present at an exhibition of 150 photographs published by legendary magazine Vanity Fair that opens Thursday in London. "Vanity Fair Portraits: Photographs 1913-2008" will be open to the public until May 26 at the National Portrait Gallery in central London. "It's the 90th anniversary for Vanity Fair and the 25th anniversary of the rebirth" of the magazine, David Friend, editor of creative development at the magazine, told AFP. In 1936, "when the world was becoming dark, Vanity Fair left the party," Friend said. During the lean years of the 1930s, in the midst of the Great Depression, the magazine became too expensive to produce and with the spectre of World War II looming on the horizon, the 1920s and the avant-garde culture which led to Vanity Fair's initial creation faded away. But at the beginning of the 1980s, according to Friend, "things were booming again. We had the wonderful potential to be in the spirit of the times like it was in the 20s." Publishing house Conde Nast re-launched the magazine in 1983, which retained its aura despite the 50-year absence. The exhibition marks the first time Vanity Fair's photographs, which revolutionised the way celebrities could be featured in portraits thanks to the work of celebrated photographers Baron de Meyer, Edward Steichen, Man Ray and Cecil Beaton, from both periods sit side-by-side in a public forum. That tradition has been more recently taken up by Helmut Newton, Nan Goldin, Mario Testino and Annie Leibovitz. Movie stars, writers, artists, singers and finally political personalities and businesspeople have all been photographed by Vanity Fair, which has been primarily interested by the personalities that loomed large during their peaks. American actress Demi Moore's appearance on the magazine's cover, naked and seven months pregnant, in August 1991 notably caused a stir at the time. The gallery features photos, some of them slightly yellowed with age, of Louis Armstrong, Josephine Baker, Ernest Hemingway, Louise Brookes, Frida Kahlo and Diego Ribera, Vaslav Nijinski, Douglas Fairbanks, Fred Astaire, Anna Pavlova and Jess Owens. More recently, portraits of Norman Mailer, David Hockney, Miles Davis, former US president Ronald Reagan, current President George W. Bush and his war cabinet, Boris Berezovsky, Gianna Agnelli and Margaret Thatcher are all also available for the public to see, along with a plethora of actors and actresses. After the exhibition in London concludes, it will move on to Edinburgh, Los Angeles and Canberra.
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