Makers
The people who decided how this looks
The photographers, directors and artists whose work defined how this looks.
These are real people and the notes stay to the public professional record: published work, exhibitions, documented career, and the criticism the work has attracted. Nothing here speculates about anyone's private life, and where a reputation is contested both readings are set out rather than resolved.
Photographers
The studio names whose framing became the default for this subject.
- Robert Mapplethorpe
Mapplethorpe photography applied a sculptural studio vocabulary to the leather subculture, and the pictures went on trial after he died. The public record.
- Helmut Newton
Helmut Newton dominant women: the recurring figure in his fashion work, the technique that built her, and the case for and against, left as the dispute it is.
- Nan Goldin
Nan Goldin photography is the documentary answer to the studio tradition: available light, no direction, and a photographer inside the room she is picturing.
- Catherine Opie
Catherine Opie photography takes the most status-conferring format in Western picture making, the formal portrait against a rich ground, and points it at communities the format was never built for.
Directors
Filmmakers who put power exchange on screen and were taken seriously for it.
Every one of these pictures needed two people
A photographer arranges. Somebody else agrees to be arranged. The second half of that transaction never appears in the credits.
See where it happens now