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Salo Art Museum continues its series of international photographic exhibitions with the opening in March 2008 of FASHION, an exhibition of fashion photography produced by the Magnum Photos, which has been brought to Salo from Paris. This exhibition is Salo Art Museum’s chance to voice its own take on the particularly springtime phenomenon of fashion. It is an international exhibition about the world of fashion which explores not only fashion’s lightness and freshness, the people who use it and the stimulating influence it has on them, but also the vanity that it embodies.

FASHION is an exhibition, under the Magnum label, of the work of three masters of photography who have toured the world and won considerable fame with their own photographic exhibitions: Bruce Gilden, Alec Soth and Martin Parr. Since 2000 they have succeeded in combining their own personal styles into a distinct unity under the common denominator ‘FASHION MAG’. The name is an ironic play on the fashion magazines it is poking fun at. The contents of the exhibition are part documentary, part an account of fashion’s all-pervading nature which has seeped into society everywhere. What can be seen here in Salo, then, is an exhibition about a highly amusing and creatively-charged adventure into the wonderland of fashion, into which the three photographers have taken a particularly probing look.

Magnum’s FASHION exhibition, originally called ‘FASHION MAG’, is an annual photographic project in which one photographer produces an exhibition about fashion, using entirely his own interpretation of the subject and his own choice of photographs, with an accompanying publication in which the photographers even write the lead articles themselves. The three individual exhibitions which have been produced so far can be seen for the first time as a combined exhibition at Salo Art Museum. An exhibition of nearly 200 photographs, FASHION will be on show at Salo Art Museum for two months, from March 8^th until May 4^th 2008.

The first exhibition was realized by English photographer Martin Parr (born 1952) in Paris in 2005, since when it has been shown in Tokio, among other places, supplemented and enhanced by a new tabloid publication. In a typically English manner, Martin Parr’s photographs combine intelligent observation with warm humour in the depiction of ordinary people’s exaggerated attempts at using fashion to draw attention to themselves. Martin Parr deepens his perspective on the phenomenon of fashion by examining it in the larger context of the lifestyle and typical characteristics of such diverse nationalities as the British and the Japanese. In his photos we can see rubber hotdogs and miniskirts teamed with fishnet tights. In creating his own fashion magazine, Parr encounters a franker, more sincere side to fashion than that which is usually seen, and uses his lens to reveal instances of global light-hearted madness. He provocatively documents the triviality, banality and boredom of present-day life, for which, according to Parr, you need humour to get you through.

In 2006 Magnum commissioned American photojournalist Bruce Gilden (b. 1946) to create the second ‘Fashion Mag’. Gilden achieved fame for photographing the streets of New York at night. His childhood in the cityscape of Brooklyn imbued him even as a child with an interest in the ways and means of the city, as well as the personal, individual characteristics of the people who live there. For his Fashion Mag, therefore, he focussed his camera on fashion as manifested in New York street-life. His photographs include public figures like the Versaces and others whose image depends on conspicuously standing out from the crowd, both in terms of their lifestyle and of how they look. Gilden developed his shots into big black-and-white prints which lend a note of gloom and severity to the subject matter.

The third Fashion Mag exhibition opened in Paris at the Jeu de Paume gallery in the summer of 2007. It was the work of young American photographer Alec Soth (1969), whose comet-like career has included having his pictures published in the likes of Vogue. The subject of his Fasion Mag is a grand, elegant interpretation of the biggest names in the fashion-house world, such as Dior, and his photos include, for example, images from the realm of the haute couture shows. On the other hand, Alec Soth himself is from Minnesota in Middle America. So in order to make his exhibition more of a reflection of himself he had the idea of having half of it as an illustration of how fashion has even got as far as his home town, where the lifestyle is very modest. For example, in Paris Soth photographed Karl Lagerfeldt in front of the Grand Palais, whereas in Minnesota he snapped the image of a girl with a Chanel carrier-bag standing around outside a beauty salon. In this way Soth was able to capture the contrast he required for his own Fashion Mag magazine.

Alec Soth describes how, in a photograph, beauty has a particular significance. Soth’s fashion photos are documentaries about a certain state of affairs but equally they are also constructed situations. In studying the nature of beauty and contrasting its elements, Soth has even been drawn to photographing designer perfume bottles in the setting of a natural landscape.

On leaving Salo, Alec Soth’s exhibition will continue its tour by going on to Berlin in the summer of 2008.

Salo Art Museum Veturitalli, Mariankatu 14, 24240 Salo, tel. (02) 778 4892. Open Tues–Fri 10–18.00, Sat 11–17.00, Sun 11–18.00. Entrance fee 3€, under-18s free.