1991

FRANCESCO SCAVULLO 
RETROSPECTIVE EXHIBITION WITHIN TORINO FOTOGRAFIA ’91 BIENNIAL

Fashion photography stands for deliberately selecting and styling images to showcase current fashion trends. It serves to give a fleeting, contemporary style a more enduring presence, reflecting an awareness of the multiple meanings that can and are intended to be communicated through this medium. Beyond its basic role as a visualisation of societal dreams, fashion photography also functions as a space for aesthetic and technical experimentation, the development of a recognisable visual identity, and the expression of the photographer's individual style. 
This is especially clear when examining the continuity of Francesco Scavullo's work.
As part of the International Photography Biennale in Turin, from September 4 to 24, 1991, his retrospective was held, organised by Liliana Cavendish and Serge de Yougoslavie. The author's nearly fifty-year career is marked by eighty large-format, black-and-white photographs, selected from two famous series: ‘Fashion Photographs’ and ‘Portraits’.
Scavullo began working for Vogue in the 1940s. After three years, he became an assistant to Horst P. Horst, whose retrospective exhibition was held concurrently at the Musée des Arts Décoratifs in the Louvre, Paris. 
Since 1948, she has worked for Seventeen, a magazine aimed at teenagers. 
Very early on, he realised that alongside fashion, there is always a specific demand for style; a demand to create an authentic ideal of a woman, which is achieved through interventions on the model's persona: from makeup, hairstyle, and decorative details to clothing, pose, and lighting. 
He built this ideal on a natural look, in contrast to the fashion imperatives of the time. 
By presenting fashion collections at a specific moment in time and place, and through interventions in makeup and hairstyling, he created a comprehensive picture of contemporary trends and style.
Over the following decades, he began to publish his photographs in magazines such as Esquire, Harper's Bazaar, Vogue, and Cosmopolitan, expressing his creative sensibility through a unique interpretation of the woman as an object, her styling, and a moderate degree of artifice within the scene as a whole. 
The hallmark of his photography, technically, is diffused lighting, and in terms of style, the ability to “capture life”.
The second part of the exhibition features a selection of portraits spanning fashion, music, film, and theatre, including Grace Jones, Barbra Streisand, Sting, Madonna, Pavarotti, Frank Sinatra, Sophia Loren, Lauren Bacall, Liza Minnelli, and Bette Davis.
His name has become synonymous with the jet set, but his portraits, despite their glamour, reveal a more intimate and human side of these famous personalities.
Through this exhibition, Francesco Scavullo is showcased as one of the most intriguing fashion photographers in America, affirming in his own way the parallel drawn by Susan Sontag in her book “Essays on Photography”: “Stéphane Mallarmé wrote: everything in the world exists to end up in a book. Today, everything in the world exists to end up in a photograph.”


Exhibition review published in Vreme magazine, Belgrade