2020.04.11 - 07.25

Curated by photography specialist Nathalie Herschdorfer, director of the Swiss Museum of Fine Arts Le Locle, SCoP is thrilled to present an amazing array of photographs from the creative vision of photographers like Paolo Roversi and Nick Knight, the late Peter Lindbergh (1944-2019), Bruce Weber, Mario Testino and Juergen Teller. We are also proud to do so alongside the work of women photographers like Ellen von Unwerth, Viviane Sassen, Inez Van Lamsweerde, Emma Summerton, Ina Jang, and two of China’s hot young photographers Kiki Xue and Feng Li. Join us in discovering how their highly individual approach to the aesthetics of an image takes their works beyond the simple ideas we have about fashion.

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In recent decades, fashion photography has expanded its horizons beyond a “hard sell” of the garments themselves. The creative vision of its photographers today gives ever more visual form to the diverse ways in which we like to identify ourselves. Success is elusive. How to keep up with a pace of style that would be for most people exhausting? To make a mark, fashion photographers rely upon creative vision today like never before where each new season presents a new array of aspirations. For the photographers presented here, the challenge is clearly exhilarating.

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“Beyond Fashion” comes to Shanghai as part of an international tour. And, located arguably in China’s most stylish city, SCoP is honored to play host to an exhibition which goes beyond the simple artifice of a conventional fashion photo, to look not only at how models are used to sell us the garments we desire, but at how clothing has come to define everything about our personality. In less politically-correct times, we would describe our theme as “Clothes maketh the man”. Today, clothes clearly maketh everyone! Not only do women drive the fashion industry with a gusto equal to that of their male counterparts, but there is an entire generation of female photographers ambitious to be every bit as good and better than the male legends of the fashion industry.

Come and see for yourself how these amazingly creative photographers play with aesthetics in extraordinary ways to project narratives that reach beyond fashion.