For more than 30 years, Mario Testino has been titillating, enthralling and provoking us with his countless fashion images and celebrity portraits. His work in Vogue, Vanity Fair and many other glossies has chronicled the most famous models, actors and royals of a generation. Until February 3, 2013, the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston features many of his most iconic images in two exhibitions: Mario Testino: In Your Face and British Royal Portraits.
Like Richard Avedon, Helmut Newton and Herb Ritts before him he has blurred the lines between fashion photography and art. His contemporaries including Bruce Weber, Steven Meisel, Steven Klein, Annie Leibovitz and now Ellen Von Unsworth not only document the lives of the world’s biggest celebrities, they are celebrities themselves.
‘In Your Face’ showcases 122 images of supermodels like Gisele Bundchen and Kate Moss, performers such as Lady Gaga and Mick Jagger and actors including Nicole Kidman and Gwyneth Paltrow. This roll call of beautiful ‘it’ people wouldn’t be complete without two of the world’s most famous (and photographed) sportsmen – David Beckham and Tom Brady.Testino has confessed to an obsession with making his subjects look their best and his Vanity Fair portraits of Diana and Madonna, prove he usually fulfills his obsession. He somehow endowed the People’s Princess with an even more iconic beauty in his famous black and white portraits. And the Material Girl never looked better than on her windswept ‘Ray of Light’ cover.There are some delightful and candid private party snapshots of Anna Wintour, a nearly naked Gisele Bundchen and JLo 2 ways: elegant in ball gown with a posse of Dobermans and complete with codpiece for the cover of the March 2012, V magazine. There is black and white and color, nudes and fashion campaigns. The retrospective also allows us ordinary folk temporary access to Testino’s world with 16 screens showing behind the scenes video of the celebrity snapper at work. The hand-held multimedia guide also recalls career-defining moments through audio and video selections. Always in search of capturing a special moment in time, Testino started taking smaller cameras to parties like the Met Ball. Of a particularly candid shot of Anna Wintour leaving one of the biggest events in the fashion calendar, he said, “Photographers are like cowboys. The quicker you draw your gun, the more likely you are to survive. These moments exist for a split second. This picture could have been nothing the second before, or the second after.” Some may see this exhibition as just another example of a celebrity obsessed world: pretty snaps of beautiful people in glamorous settings. But, many of these images are extremely revealing. And, I don’t just mean the nudes.
