The National Portrait Gallery of Australia will play host to Vanity Fair Portraits: Photographs 1913 – 2008 this June.
This is the first exhibition to bring together rare vintage portraits with contemporary classics from Vanity Fair and the legendary Condé Nast Archive.
Vanity Fair Portraits: Photographs 1913 – 2008 celebrates the work of master photographers Edward Steichen, Cecil Beaton, Annie Leibovitz and Mario Testino to name a few.
Having already hit England and the USA, Canberra is the only stop nationally, for this travelling exhibition.
Vanity Fair’s iconic photographs continue to make news. Since the magazine’s re-launch in 1983, cover images including a very pregnant Demi Moore, a formal portrait of President Bush’s Afghan War Cabinet and most recently actresses Scarlett Johansson and Keira Knightley photographed naked have been embedded in the collective cultural consciousness.
Annie Leibovitz has become the dominant image-maker of Vanity Fair, just as Edward Steichen dominated Vanity Fair’s first period. Steichen (1879-1973), who created an unrivalled gallery of portraits of the dominant personalities of the 1920s and 1930s, has a worthy successor in Leibovitz and Vanity Fair Portraits is the first major exhibition to display their works together.
“We are very pleased to be able to present this exhibition to Australian audiences. It fits perfectly with our interest in celebrity, style, of-the-moment people and, of course, the work of great portrait photographers,” said Andrew Sayers, Director, National Portrait Gallery, Canberra.
“A particular feature of the exhibition season at the National Portrait Gallery is the inclusion of a number of Australians who have made it on the world’s stage.
Like all of the subjects in the exhibition these Australians have been captured with that mixture of flair, originality and incisiveness that is a unique quality of Vanity Fair.”
Runs 5 June to 30 August 2009.
