After Fashion’s Me Too Reckoning, Fashion Photography’s Good Men Are Having Their Moment

2018 was the fashion industry’s reckoning with its own image. Fashion photographers Patrick Demarchelier, Bruce Weber, Mario Testino and Terry Richardson were dropped by the industry at large after numerous lawsuits claimed that the photographers had abused their power by exploiting their subjects. Their names were banished from the pages of glossy magazines owned by Condé Nast and Hearst.

In their absence, the industry made way for new talent with women photographers shooting magazine covers, while museums reflected the sudden shift with dedicated exhibitions such as Tate Britain’s Lee Miller survey and the Metropolitan Museum of Art’s The New Woman Behind the Camera. But now that the dust has settled on the past, the work of male fashion photographers is being celebrated again. Penn & Fashion at Maison Européenne de la Photographie (MEP) coincides with Paris Fashion Week, opening on September 30; Tim Walker’s Fairyland: Love and Legends opens at the National Portrait Gallery in London on October 9; We All Dress for Bill will open at the New York Historical will open in the winter of 2027 and a Richard Avedon documentary will arrive on Netflix on November 11. So, what’s changed?

“Admittedly, many great fashion photographers are men, and for a long time, the art world has been dominated by men. But that is changing,” Pascal Hoël, curator of Penn & Fashion and head of collections at MEP told ARTnews. The exhibition she worked on traces the photographer’s work from 1947 to 2008 and it’s evident that women are central to each shot, from his wife Lisa Fonssagrives who modeled many creations designed by Cristóbal Balenciaga to models Jean Patchett, Marisa Berenson, Naomi Sims and Lauren Hutton who became regular collaborators.

The exhibitions on Penn, Walker and Cunningham don’t subtract from their talent, but it does highlight the great disparity between male and female photographers – the likes of Lillian Bassman, Deborah Turbeville and Corinne Day are hardly the subject of solo exhibitions, instead they’re grouped into exhibitions such as The 90s: Art and Fashion, which opens at the Tate Britain on October 8 or the Victoria and Albert Museum’s Selling Dreams: One Hundred Years of Fashion Photography from 2014. “Fashion photography has always been full of extraordinary women photographers, stylists, editors, models, art directors and image-makers, but the museum-friendly story can still end up being – here is the singular male genius behind the camera. It’s less complex and easier to tell,” Terry Newman, assistant professor at Regent’s University London and author of Legendary Artists and the Clothes They Wore told ARTnews. “On the one hand, these are photographers who genuinely deserve serious attention and have all had an enormous influence on the visual language of fashion photography and it would be reductive to dismiss their work simply because they are men.”

What sets Penn, Walker and Cunningham apart is their gaze, too. Walker’s exhibition marks his fourth major display in the U.K. and for Tim Walker’s Fairyland: Love and Legends, he has been capturing portraits since 2020. “The new exhibition is different because it’s about real people and their achievements. The running theme throughout the exhibition is love – at its core this exhibition is about everyone’s right to love. It celebrates love in all its forms – the power of connection between friends, chosen families, couples and communities,” Susanna Brown, curator of Walker’s upcoming exhibition, told ARTnews. The exhibition spotlights the founding members of the Gay Liberation Front, queer artists and musicians with a queer fan base such as Björk, Lady Gaga, Frank Ocean and Chappell Roan.

In the case of Cunningham, it’s an anthropological study through fashion. “Cunningham considered himself a fashion historian. As a photojournalist, he chronicled three worlds: philanthropic events and galas, everyday street fashion, and fashion shows,” Keren Ben-Horin, associate curator of public history at the New York Historical told ARTnews. Cunningham’s photography transformed fashion, taking it away from studio backdrops and into the real world. “His great achievement was understanding that fashion doesn’t only happen in magazines or on runways – it happens on the street, in the way people construct themselves and recognize one another. His work is democratic in a way that much editorial photography isn’t,” said Newman.

Another photographer who is also being celebrated for turning fashion’s clean image on its head is Juergen Teller, his photograph of Kate Moss with pink hair from 1998 has been used as the main image to promote The 90s: Art and Fashion. “Teller’s deliberately raw, anti-glamour aesthetic is equally a radically different visual proposition,” said Newman. “While Teller often tries to disrupt conventional fashion beauty altogether, I think that this disruption doesn’t automatically make the power relationship disappear. For Teller his work is often read as deliberately anti-glamour and anti-fashion-image, but that doesn’t automatically mean it escapes gendered power dynamics.” It will be evident to visitors that fashion photography has long been dominated by men, not just by the names on the placards.

The interest in fashion photography and women in the field is growing. Brown recently wrote a chapter in the book A Century of Women’s Fashion Photography: 1925-present slated for a 2028 release by Bloomsbury Visual Arts. In her research, she found that in June 1941, American Vogue published 16 portraits of the magazine’s star photographers from the past 25 years and Toni Frissell was the only woman among them. “However, things have changed so much since then. There are many brilliant women working as fashion photographers today and they’re being celebrated by museums and galleries, too,” she said.