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Acid Reflex: In Conversation with Miles Aldridge
A selling exhibition of portraits by the famed fashion photographer and ‘Vogue’ contributor explores the language of portraiture from the Renaissance through Surrealism to the present today.
L ondon-based photographer Miles Aldridge is the son of influential 1960s illustrator Alan Aldridge. He grew up within a Technicolor kaleidoscope of cultural textures, ranging from quirky 50s pop culture to Surrealism, via film noir, to his father’s psychedelic creations for The Beatles, Elton John, The Who and many more.
After failing to make it as an illustrator (“I found it boring”, he tells me) and a pop video director (“The problem was I hated the bands”), Aldridge fell into fashion photography quite by accident. Years shooting celebrities and models for Vogue, The New Yorker, The New York Times and, most notably, Vogue Italia, among other leading fashion titles, this cinema-loving polymath forged his own artistic practise, producing C-type prints, Polaroids, screenprints, photogravures and drawings drenched in acidic colours, mysterious subjects and haunting eyes – all seemingly snapped at a moment of reflection or intention, dramatic collisions of drama, colour and narrative.
TOILETMILES PAPERALDRIDGE, on show between Sotheby’s London 31 March–17 April and Lyndsey Ingram Gallery 24 March–17 April, accompanies the third special edition from TOILETPAPER magazine founders, artist Maurizio Cattelan and photographer Pierpaolo Ferrari with Miles Aldridge. Their latest issue of TOILETPAPER sequences a selection of Aldridge’s glamorous and elaborate mise-en-scène images in a palette of vibrant acidic hues. At the same time, Miles will host a themed takeover of Sotheby’s Story Café on George Street, where he will offer portrait shoots for the public for the duration of the exhibition.
Arsalan Mohammad
How did you assemble the works on view at Sotheby’s?
Miles Aldridge
Well, the simple, straight answer to that is that the Sotheby’s show consists of works that were stored my studio – all the framed works that I had available, bar a handful. So that’s 30 framed artworks. There is no overarching theme to the show, but a sort of randomness.
Arsalan Mohammad
You’re also going to be holding portrait sessions – as a photographer accustomed to extensive preparation and staging, how will the relative spontaneity of doing quick portraits work for you?
Miles Aldridge
I recently shot Elton John for the cover of Time magazine, where I had him horsing around in a photo booth. I was told I would have 20 minutes with him. I actually had 18. But we delivered 12 different portraits within those 18 minutes. So I see this portrait session in a similar way. I’ll be meeting somebody for the first time, see what they’re wearing, see what they look like. There’ll be an array of props that they can play with and respond to, and they’ll take some direction from me. It’s rather like speed dating in a way.
“I see the history of portraiture spanning Lucas Cranach and Albrecht Dürer all the way to the randomness and silliness of a schoolchild portrait.”
- Miles Aldridge
Arsalan Mohammad
Speed portraiting!
Miles Aldridge
Yes! And I’m hoping to do as many as 100 portraits. It’ll be like being a Green Beret – being really, really fit in your approach, like doing a thousand press-ups, or something.
I like this idea of the photographer with his Polaroid camera riffing on the history of the Polaroid portrait genre – which, of course, was really defined by Warhol. So for me, in these portrait sessions, I see the history of portraiture spanning Lucas Cranach and Albrecht Dürer’s very precise portraits of people holding a flower or something meaningful all the way to the randomness and silliness of a schoolchild portrait. It encompasses all of that.
I believe the history of photography is two things running parallel from the very beginning. One is the kind of Julia Cameron idea of a set-up scene for a photograph where some guy has been roped in, put a crown on his head and turned into King Lear. At the same time there is a photograph of a prostitute in a street by Atget, or a dog peeing on a sunlit tree, or a church with people coming out of the church.
Arsalan Mohammad
Your portraits usually feature subjects deep within a narrative festooned with all manner of props and accessories. Will you bring these to the Sotheby’s shoots?
Miles Aldridge
I’m someone who enjoys colour, Surrealism and poking fun at things, so I’ve already ordered some of the same things that we had on Elton’s shoot – that’s a skull, artificial flowers, a box of popcorn, some shopping, a cup of tea, a telephone. Maybe a plate of fried eggs could be good. But I think we’ll riff on it from there. When I shot Elton, I had these orange curtains made, which I remember being in passport photo booths when I was a kid. I’ve had them made here in several colours. Of course, people can bring props too or be photographed as a couple. I’m very excited to see who’s interested in coming.
Arsalan Mohammad
This more spontaneous approach to picture-making contrasts vividly with the way you characteristically prepare for shoots, with extensive preparation and staging.
Miles Aldridge
My earlier Green Beret point is that yes, my normal way of making photographs is very controlled and precise. However, within that precision and control, I always like to leave the door open to see what happens on the day. I think the reason photography is such an impressive art form – and maybe the most important art form – is because it relates to the real world in a way that painting can’t. A painting is always one step removed from the real world.
Whether it’s artificially constructed or a snap moment of the real world as it’s happening, gone after that fleeting moment for ever and ever, what I’m trying to say is that even though I set up a picture, it’s important to me that it doesn’t look stilted and dead.
Exhibition Highlights
A Perfect Mum
“At that time, my son was going to football practice at his school, and I noticed all these mums coming to pick up their children, dressed as if they were going out to dinner. So it’s like, do you need red lipstick to pick up your son from football practice on a Saturday afternoon? It sent my mind whirring into a story of a film. Maybe a mum is in love with the coach? Or she’s in love with one of the other dads? I like the idea of people having secret lives. It’s like a Raymond Carver short story – a husband on the way out, saying to his wife: ‘Why the hell are you getting so dressed up to get Mickey from the football?’
“Of course, it’s inappropriate and silly to us, because we think it’s so funny, and life is a comedy. But some of these things are epically important. This can mean love, relationships or the breaking of a marriage. These are huge things. So here she’s coming straight through the children. Like a lot of the women in my pictures, she’s a determined woman with a mission.”
Fast Cars, Fast Food
“She is, in some respects, one of the women in that scene from Blue Velvet where Isabella Rossellini’s child is kept captive, and when they go round to visit, these women are doing this very embarrassing dancing with a kind of 50s twist. It’s also, for me, almost like a Diane Arbus woman, just captured in a strange bedroom or hotel room. But all those references go through the filter or the mincemeat machine of my own ideas about picture-making and technicolour. I do quite often look at paintings that I like when planning an image, and Francis Bacon is a frequent inspiration in terms of colour palette. So I might take a Bacon painting and just steal the colours and put it into my set. It’s like what JG Ballard wrote about Blue Velvet: ‘script by Franz Kafka, set design by Francis Bacon.’”
Venus Etcetera
“This is a gigantic screenprint, 1.5 metres wide. I started with screenprints around about 2016, and while they’re very satisfying to make, they’re very, very difficult to make too. I was thinking about people like Fernand Léger and those kind of great still-lifes of things like keys, playing cards, matchboxes and cigarettes that he composed. And enjoying the bulkiness and the weight of all those things. But it was just also another way to think of a story about cinema and using the television as a frame for that.
“This is from a series called ‘Venus Etcetera’, and in all the five images I smuggled a Venus in – which you can see here just on top of the television. Going back to the technicalities of the printing, the areas in black and white are printed in silver ink. What I’ve enjoyed about screen-printing is having a less easy experience of a surface of the image as well, so it’s not just this kind of uniform colour print. It has areas printed in flat colour and printed in silver ink to disturb the eye. Make the eye do a bit more work, keep the eye awake!”
In Shadows I Boogie
“She’s trapped. There’s a sense of longing. It’s a woman who has a secret life beyond the captivity of her suburban home. I did this project with artist Harland Miller, who’s an old friend. We met when he was trying to be a writer, before he was a painter, and I was trying to be a film director. He had this big show, and I don’t know why I had the nerve to ask myself this question, but I wondered, ‘How can I respond to these Harland paintings? What would I do?’ The answer seemed so obvious and stupid that I suggested it to him. ‘Hey Harland, would you mind if I reproduced your paperback paintings and gave them to one of my models to pose with?’
“He said, ‘Yes, of course, do you what you want.’ I was sure he was assuming they would be a complete flop, because it was such a stupid idea. But he loved them, and I loved them too.”
Doors
“The doors are my most recent series of work – and the most abstract of the ones we’ve discussed. The way the colours resonate – it’s almost like, without sounding too pompous or like one of those exhibition pamphlets, there’s elements of American Abstract Expressionism in those blocks of colour. They’re not Rothkos, but maybe a Pop art version of that.
“I like the idea of a strange apartment where, in a Hitchcockian way, you don’t really know who is behind the door. And you get these odd characters coming out. The one with the baby doll is clearly someone who has some extreme identity crisis going on in terms of who she is. The name on the buzzer is Madeleine Vallens. Madeleine is the name of the character in Alfred Hitchcock’s Vertigo, and Dorothy Vallens is a character in David Lynch’s Blue Velvet. It was a nice nod to these extreme women that I really enjoy in my work, and in culture and in history. When they’re driven to a point of crisis and use all their cleverness and smartness to succeed.”
