• Intelligencer
  • The Cut
  • Vulture
  • The Strategist
  • Curbed
  • Grub Street
  • Subscribe to the Magazine Give a Gift Subscription Buy Back Issues Current Issue Contents
    Subscribe to New York Magazine
  • Subscribe
  • Profile
    Sign Out
The Cut
  • Style
  • Self
  • Culture
  • Power
Style
  • Fashion
  • Beauty
  • Parties & Red Carpet
  • Fashion Shows
  • Cathy Horyn
  • The Cut Shop
Self
  • Health & Wellness
  • The State of the Uterus
  • Parenting
  • Advice
  • Sex & Relationships
  • Horoscopes
Culture
  • Books
  • Television
  • Movies
  • Music
  • Celebrity
Power
  • Politics
  • Work
  • Money
  • Rebecca Traister
More
  • Latest Stories
  • Video
  • About Us
  • nymag.com
  • New York Magazine
  • Intelligencer
  • Vulture
  • The Cut
  • The Strategist
  • Grub Street
  • Curbed
first looks
April 18, 2013

Miles Aldridge: The Photographer With an Undying Love for Women

By Julie Ma

Share

  • Share
  • Tweet
Photo: Courtesy of Miles Aldridge

In the introduction to the fashion photographer’s first monograph, Miles Aldridge: I Only Want You to Love Me (Rizzoli), Glenn O’Brien writes, “Planet Aldridge is a luxury world where surreality reigns. All is perfect, yet something is amiss. Life is fashion, after a fashion, but this is hardcore fashion, the end of the luxury road.”

Though a bit cryptic, O’Brien’s words — typed out in a shade of hot pink, no less — serve as the perfect entry into Aldridge’s carefully concocted world. The book’s 280 pages are filled with 270 photographs of an alterna-adult twist on Willy Wonka. It’s a surreal “candy-colored” realm pumped with clashing, oversaturated pop-art colors, with its only inhabitants — immaculately dressed women — staring off into some unknown with dead, vacant eyes. Externally, they are well-groomed, sensual specimens of perfection; yet internally, they appear to be lacking something human.

Every photograph in the book was formerly published in high-fashion glossies like Vogue Italia, Paradis, Vogue U.S., Numéro, Wallpaper, Ponystep, and V magazine. Also included are Aldridge’s hand-sketched storyboards. The book, slated to be released in early May, will accompany a show at the Steven Kasher Gallery beginning May 8. The Cut spoke to Aldridge over the phone about his unconventional breakthrough into fashion photography, his musings on the human need for love, and his parents, both of whom he says molded him into the color-adoring artist he is today.

Click through the slideshow for a first look at I Only Want You to Love Me, including one shot of cats with ukuleles strapped onto their backs.

You started off as an illustrator. How did you end up in fashion photography?
I went to art school to become an illustrator because I wanted to be like my dad. He [Alan Aldridge] was a very famous illustrator in the sixties and seventies and I thought he had the best job. I went to art school, came out, was an illustrator, and found it
really boring. Here I was doing watercolors of trees with pound signs on them to explain financial growth. I don’t think anyone in their mid-twenties should be doing watercolors. It’s not sexy enough. [Laughs.] So I decided I would either be a film director or a photographer.

And you ended up doing both.
I started making little super-8 art films, things like flowers, close-ups, dogs running across the ground [
Laughs]. Not very good again, but they were slightly romantic. I ended up becoming a video director, directing pop videos for the Charlatans and the Jesus and Mary Chain. My girlfriend at the time, who was in all these films, was like a dying rose, sickly, but beautiful. When Kate Moss became a model, everyone said, “Your girlfriend looks a bit like Kate Moss, why don’t you get her to be a model?” So I took some pictures of her on a stills camera and these pictures ended up going in her portfolio. The portfolio was taken to British Vogue, and British Vogue said, “Hey, you took these pictures, they’re really cool.” Then I was called in and the rest is history. I want to be really clear about it, I was not a photographer. I was a sort of mediocre London video director.

So you started off as this rookie photographer with close to zero experience, how did your style come into place?
I was not interested at all with anything that had to do with technique. I didn’t even know what the camera in my hand was called most times because we would rent them. I was just so interested in the girls. Fascinated. In love, in a way. In a stupid way. I still am. But it’s kind of like in the way that only someone who doesn’t meet enough girls is fascinated by girls, you know? [Laughs.] I’ll always remember just having Linda Evangelista in front of me. And looking through the lens, seeing her face there, and pulling it into focus. And I remember asking, “Could you open your mouth?” because I thought that it would make it more beautiful. I took the picture and it was like such an erotic, sexy. You know, it’s like with the camera between the man and a woman, you could get away with murder. I’m not, like, gregarious around women.

You used to shoot a lot of covers on white backgrounds. Was color the natural step against doing white backgrounds?
Yeah. It was a reaction to that. It’s very hard to change when people book you for one thing. But Franca Sozzani from Italian
Vogue has been the one who’s supported my desire to change and given me the space to. I was [in Japan] for a project and having seen all this black and white Peter Lindbergh work at an exhibition, I remember thinking to myself, “I just have to do color.” So then color became a thing.

Do you retouch your images at all?
Interestingly, not as much as you’d think. I shoot on film because — you know, I’m aware of digital, and I shoot a lot of my commercial projects on digital because that’s just the way of the world now. Film has a kind of signature to it already from a color point of view. It has a color bias, and a color balance. What I’ve loved through the history of color photography is that it films an inability to capture truly the real world. To me, it’s a no-brainer to continue shooting on film and that’s how the colors really are that vivid.
If you work digitally, you take a picture and look at the picture. That is completely different. And that, unfortunately, satisfies the eye too quickly.

Since you don’t retouch much, do you play around with lighting?
Typically, there’s lots of light hanging off of weird contraptions in my studio, but what they tend to do is they tend to trap the person in the picture, like they remove any kind of freedom they might think they have in the picture. And there’s an element of photography that is about uncomfortableness historically that I quite like.

Right, that’s completely evident in your work. It’s full of these women who look trapped, perfect, but vacant.
You know,
unsettling is what I’m interested in. I look at fashion magazines and they tell me that the world is filled with beautiful women. I read the newspapers, and they tell me the world is such horribleness, sadness, and strangeness, and mostly bad things, right? So my work is really a discussion of the two contrary premises. I want to set a sort of unsettling message. But my trick is to sugarcoat it in these bright colors. It satisfies my need to talk about my world and reach an audience through pages of Vogue Italia as well as the clothes — but really talk about things that I think are part of being a human being right now.

Is this a comment on the fashion world?
No, I don’t have the fashion world as my target at all. It’s more, this is my experience of my life and the people I know and what I read about in the newspapers and what I see and what I imagine.

You mentioned your dad earlier, but this book is dedicated to your mother. Is there any particular reason as to why?
My father is often equated as being an obvious influence on my work. The truth of the matter is that I hadn’t really thought that my mother was an influence. When asked, I’d usually just say, “No, she was just my mum.” But actually, the women in my book are quite closely associated with my mother. My mother was really, she was a victim of the divorce, and it was quite unpleasant, and she was left alone after that. And she never
really picked herself up, unfortunately. And she died, that was probably twenty years after the divorce. She was really an image for me of someone who was asking these bloody questions, asking “How the fuck did I get here?” I think she’d be happy to know that what she went through is also remembered and it’s part of the human experience. And I wanted to share that in my work — people respond to it. They don’t need to know the background, but people respond to the elements of melancholy and unease.

View
1 / 16 Photos
Cover
A Dazzling Beauty #2, first published in Vogue Italia, March 2008
A Family Portrait #3, first published in Vogue Italia, August 2011 Photo: © Miles Aldridge
First Impression #3, first published in Vogue Nippon, March 2006
The Last Range of Colours #3, first published in Vogue Italia, September 2007 Photo: © Miles Aldridge
A Precious Glam #2, first published in Vogue Italia, March 2011
Cat Story #3, first publsihed in Vogue Italia, May 2008 Photo: © Miles Aldridge
Actress #5, first published in Vogue Italia, June 2012 Photo: © Miles Aldridge
Home Works #3, first published in Vogue Italia, May 2008
The Pure Wonder #1, first published in Vogue Italia, October 2005
The Rooms #2, first published in Wallpaper, September 2011
A Family Portrait #2, first published in Vogue Italia, August 2011 Photo: © Miles Aldridge
A Perfect Mum #4, first published in Vogue Italia. November 2012
The Rooms #4, first published in Wallpaper, September 2011 Photo: © Miles Aldridge
Extravagant Sophisticated Lady #1, first published in Vogue Italia, September 2011 Photo: © Miles Aldridge
Cat Story #6, first published in Vogue Italia, May 2008 Photo: © Miles Aldridge
1 / 16

Tags:

  • first looks
  • miles aldridge
  • fashion photography
  • vogue italia
  • italian vogue
  • i only want you to love me
  • q&a
  • slideshow
  • More

More Galleries

Jan. 10, 2023
All the Looks From the 2023 Golden Globes  Sheryl Lee Ralph, Jenna Ortega, Jessica Chastain, Julia Garner, Jeremy Allen White, Angela Bassett, and more. 
parties! Sept. 23, 2022
Katie Holmes, Chloë Sevigny, and More of the Bestest Party Pics This Week  Chanel, Mejuri, and more celebrate. 
parties! Sept. 16, 2022
Doja Cat, Lil Nas X, and More of the Bestest Party Pics This Week  Fendi, Frame, and Coach all celebrated NYFW. 
emmys 2022 Sept. 12, 2022
Emmys 2022: All the Red Carpet Looks  Updating: What Hollywood is wearing to the 2022 Primetime Emmy Awards. 
By Olivia Luppino
nyfw spring 2023 Sept. 9, 2022
Gigi Hadid, Chlöe Bailey, and More of the Bestest Party Pics of the Week  Saks Fifth Avenue, Longchamp, and more celebrate the beginning of NYFW. 
rip Sept. 9, 2022
The Queen Sure Did Love to Color-Coordinate  Monochrome for decades. 
red carpet Sept. 6, 2022
The Venice Film Festival Is a Major Fashion Event  Valentino and Gucci and Armani, oh my. 
red carpet June 5, 2022
All the Best Looks at the 2022 MTV Movie and TV Awards  Sydney Sweeney, Vanessa Hudgens, Jay Ellis, and more! 
parties! May 20, 2022
The Bestest Party Looks of the Week  Harry Styles > everyone! 
parties! May 13, 2022
The Bestest Party Looks of the Week  Bury me in Dove Cameron’s Saint Sintra skirt. 
parties! May 6, 2022
The Bestest Party Looks of the Week  Cue the Met Gala after-party FOMO. 
met gala 2022 May 2, 2022
Met Gala 2022: All the Looks [Photos]  Billie Eilish, Kim Kardashian, Michelle Yeoh, Hailey Bieber, Megan Thee Stallion, Cardi B, Blake Lively, and more. 
parties! Apr. 29, 2022
The Bestest Party Looks of the Week  This one goes to Olivia Rodrigo and her sweater vest. 
parties! Apr. 22, 2022
The Bestest Party Looks of the Week  “Fuck those Zoom tops.” 
celebrity style Apr. 18, 2022
The Best Looks From Coachella 2022  From Harry Styles’s sparkling Gucci set to Megan Thee Stallion’s metallic bodysuit. 
style Apr. 13, 2022
A Look Inside the New Museum’s Spring Gala  Featuring all the best looks. 
grammys 2022 Apr. 3, 2022
Grammy Awards 2022 Red Carpet: All the Looks  Lady Gaga, Olivia Rodrigo, Lenny Kravitz, Lil Nas X, Billie Eilish, and more. 
oscars 2022 Mar. 28, 2022
How Were The Oscars After Party Looks Better Than The Actual Award Looks?  Finally, some fun. 
oscars 2022 Mar. 27, 2022
All the Looks From the 2022 Oscars Red Carpet  Zendaya, Regina Hall, Timothée Chalamet, Andrew Garfield, Kristen Stewart, Ariana DeBose, and more. 
style Mar. 22, 2022
Bridgerton Season 2 Premiere: All the Red-Carpet Looks 
  • Style
  • Self
  • Culture
  • Power
  • About The Cut
  • About New York Magazine
  • Newsletters
  • Help
  • Contact
  • Press
  • Media Kit
  • We’re Hiring
  • Privacy
  • Terms
  • Ad Choices
  • Do Not Sell or Share My Personal Information
  • Accessibility
The Cut is a Vox Media Network. © 2023 Vox Media, LLC. All rights reserved.