A new exhibition at the National Portrait Gallery celebrates The Face magazine’s influence on photography and portraiture from the 1980s to the present day.
National Portrait Gallery Exhibition Celebrating Iconic Photography
Dates: 20 February to 18 May
The Face Magazine: Culture Shift is the first major museum exhibition to focus on the iconic portraiture and fashion photography captured for The Face, the cult magazine that shaped the tastes of the nation’s youth. Featuring photographs, magazine covers and spreads and film, the exhibition explores The Face’s monumental influence throughout the 1980s, 1990s and 2000s, as well as its continued impact on the publishing landscape and the worlds of fashion and music. Organised thematically and chronologically with a focus on portraiture, the exhibition includes images created by some of the era’s most talented photographers, stylists and models, many of which have never been shown outside of the pages of the magazine.
The Face was started by Nick Logan, formerly editor of New Musical Express (NME) in the 1970s and creator of teen music magazine Smash Hits. Logan spotted a gap in the market for a monthly title aimed at a youth audience interested in a broad range of subjects that weren’t being featured in glossy fashion publications, teen magazines or the music weeklies. In doing so, he invented a new genre of publishing: the style magazine.
A selection of portraits and magazine spreads from The Face’s early years highlights the increasing overlap between music and fashion, with innovative graphic design by Neville Brody, who was the magazine’s Art Director from 1981 to 1986. The magazine’s power to promote music talent, from unknown faces to turbocharging careers, was on the rise, and photographers were given the space and freedom to create iconic images. While initially billed as ‘Rock’s Final Frontier’, The Face pushed its influence beyond music, spearheading the influence of stylists in magazine photography, and it was soon proclaiming itself ‘The World’s Best Dressed Magazine’.
Ray Petri, one of the most influential stylists of the 1980s, redefined men’s fashion within the pages of The Face. He assembled around him a group of west London creatives known as the ‘Buffalo’ group, and worked frequently with photographer Jamie Morgan. Petri and Morgan’s images were radical because of the fashion they featured – which drew inspiration from an eclectic range of references – but also because they created space for black models within the fashion industry. Their first cover together, featuring British-Burmese model Nick Kamen (Winter Sports, Jamie Morgan, January 1984), was a key moment in The Face’s history, with fashion, photography and the discovery of a new face all coalescing to create an image that defined a new zeitgeist. Within two years of appearing on the cover of The Face, Nick Kamen was starring in one of Levi’s best-known advertising campaigns.
In the late 1980s and early 1990s, The Face adopted an aesthetic and style that was in line with the emergence of acid house music, a new clubbing scene and the subsequent explosion of rave culture. Petri and Morgan’s stylized shoots gave way to black and white photographs by Corinne Day, Glen Luchford, Nigel Shafran, David Sims and Juergen Teller, championed by The Face’s then Art Director, Phil Bicker. Stylists including Melanie Ward, Malcolm Beckford, Adam Howe, Karl Templer and Derick Procope brought a new focus on casual youth style, and featured models who challenged mainstream fashion stereotypes.
The images featured unconventional male models and a new generation of women, including Emma Balfour, Rosemary Ferguson, Sarah Murray and Lorraine Pascale, who were photographed looking natural and authentic – in contrast with the high-fashion glamour that dominated the covers of Vogue. Most famously, Corinne Day showed a photograph of a then unknown model from south London to Art Director, Phil Bicker, who was immediately struck by the young Kate Moss. Moss’s subsequent covers for the magazine launched her career. This new approach to fashion photography was incredibly transgressive and transformed the genre.
As photography evolved in the 90s from analogue to digital formats, The Face was at the forefront of exploring the creative potential of new image manipulation programs, which resulted in bold, colourful and ‘hyperreal’ images, which pushed fashion photography in a new direction – a return to glamour, but with a contemporary twist. Innovation was spearheaded by the magazine’s new Art Director, Lee Swillingham (one of the co-curators of this exhibition), who recognised that advances made in digital post-production technology offered photographers more creative potential. Digital technologies shifted the photographer’s role from image-taker to image-maker, and rather than capturing a single decisive moment, the photograph became the starting point from which to manipulate an image, visualise a concept and build a narrative. Photographers including Norbert Schoerner (a co-curator of this exhibition), Andrea Giacobbe and Inez & Vinoodh embraced image-manipulation and the use of computer graphics programmes to create a new visual language for fashion photography.
Fashion stories from 1994 featured models who were photographed in the studio, before the photographs were digitally montaged onto vividly coloured stock slides from image libraries. Later in the decade, Elaine Constantine moved away from digital technologies to photograph her images in-camera, using flash to create intense and vibrant colours that evoked nostalgic memories of carefree teenage rebellion. Stylists including Mitzi Lorenz, Grey Fay and Justin Laurie, Polly Banks and Isabella Blow were also influential on these changing styles of imagery during the 1990s. Throughout the magazine’s history, The Face allowed photographers and stylists a platform to experiment and push fashion and portrait photography in exciting new directions.
The magazine ceased publication in 2004, but 15 years later it relaunched in print and online, returning to a radically altered publishing landscape. Navigating this new terrain, The Face has continued Logan’s original vision for a disruptive, creative and inclusive magazine, championing fresh talent in photography, fashion, music and graphic design, and the exhibition closes with work from this new chapter.
For more information, visit the National Portrait Gallery’s website
Like this? Check out What’s On in London In February for more art, theatre and cultural events near you.
