Wednesday, May 29, 2019 6:00 PM - 8:00 PM

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Acclaimed photography critic Vince Aletti has selected 100 significant magazine issues from his expansive personal archive, revealing images by photographers rarely seen outside their original context. It's the first survey to explore the history of photography through the lens of fashion magazines, spanning the years 1925 to 2018. Magazines featured include American, British and French Vogue, Harper's Bazaar, W, Details, Purple Fashion, The Face, Dutch, and many more.

Aletti first conceived of the book in 2009, while co-curating an exhibition at the International Center for Photography about the legendary fashion photographer Richard Avedon. Aletti, who was a photography critic at The New Yorker for many years, found that “a lot of potentially great images existed only in magazines,” having never been made into prints. Aletti then realized that, for a long while, fashion magazines were doing the work of galleries and museums, curating and displaying fine-art photography before photography was accepted as a legitimate art form, and before photo galleries and museums even existed. For artists like Avedon and Irving Penn, who shot for Bazaar and Vogue, “magazines were a way to get their work out into the world.”