Miles Aldridge. “We buy balloons, we let them go.”
“We buy balloons, we let them go.”
- Bret Easton Ellis
"I found this quote from American Psycho … For me, the quote is about how we’re at this stage of human development where we love to covet things and own things. Often those things are bright and colorful, like balloons. But also like balloons, these things we buy do not satisfy us and we let them go.” Explains Aldridge in his interview with Fiona Duncan and I couldn’t agree with him more.
A brilliant fashion photographer Miles Aldridge and his work is one of those rare examples when Fashion Photography is not only about fashion and his glossy images are never constrained by the demands of the fashion world. With a cinematic approach to photography, his view of life is very sophisticated; there is always some deeper layer of meaning to uncover, as each photograph is a complex world with psychologically complex characters in surreal and fantastic settings. He says:
“Fashion is the great mask. You feel like shit and you put on your high heels, your dress, you cover up, and off you go. You laugh your way through an evening of champagne and high jinks and frolics, but it’s still there underneath.”
After visiting Somerset House last week that shows the largest exhibition of his work to date (Miles Aldridge: I only Want You to Love Me , 10 July – 29 September 2013) I utterly loved his pop inspired over-saturated candy- coloured fashion photos slightly reminding Richard Avedon’s luxurious elegance and provocative erotically charged photos of Helmut Newton; innocence and symbolism of Pre-Raphaelites and idealized female bodies and grandiosity of Old Masters, Andy Warhol and David LaChapelle, David Lynch, Federico Fellini and Hitchcockian balance between the disturbing and the attractive.
“Photography is a medium of moments; that’s the way it works. But what I’m interested in are images that attempt to last forever. I’m interested in eternity in the way that the Mona Lisa is eternally looking back at us out of a picture frame.”
FP
