CHRONORAMA - Photographic Treasures of the 20th Century

To the 21st Century mindset a photograph may be mere snapshot of a moment in time, but on the pages of Vogue, Vanity Fair and GQ throughout the 20th Century, photography served as art form and chronicler of the times, shaping the aesthetic of a century while agitating morals on the way.  

For anyone who has ever collected glossy magazines for their photographic record of the time, Chronorama offers the century condensed to 400 masterpieces. This is an unprecedented volume of photography from the Condé Nast Archive - now part owned by the Pinault Collection - and its vast scope tells the story of a century through people, places, fashion, culture, and art.

Taken from the pages of Vogue, Vanity Fair, GQ, Glamour, House & Garden, and Mademoiselle, the prints and illustrations featured are by top photographers including Irving Penn, Helmut Newton, Edward Steichen, Lee Miller, Cecil Beaton, Horst P. Horst, George Hoyningen-Huene, and Arthur Elgort.

As Anna Wintour writes in the foreword to the book, “These are magazine pictures…Each photograph is therefore an act of journalism: This person represents our moment, these clothes tell us about the time we’re in, this building or object explains our era.”

“Is journalism art?,” she continues. “Of course, and every page of this book puts that question to rest. To tell the story of the moment you’re in is not always an easy thing. Who is relevant? What matters now? What is happening? The answers can set off a storm of debate.”

The chronology of the images begins in 1910, a year after Condé Montrose Nast bought the small weekly gazette, Vogue, with the aim of turning it into a magazine for the elite—and for those who aspired to become so. As he grew his print empire internationally, many of the century’s great photographers started their working lives at Condé Nast before being exhibited and recognized as core figures within the art market.

The portraits, of which the book and exhibition offers a sumptuous selection, freeze most of their models in an eternal youth, including a young Karl Lagerfeld as photographed by Helmut Newton. A few images even remind us that the past century was not only the one of the roaring twenties or the euphoria of consumption, but also the one of great tragedies. The elaborate banquet offered by the Vanderbilts in 1941, just before the United States entered World War II, precedes the ruins of London ravaged by German bombing, while the stare of Lauren Bacall photographed in all her ferocity is soon followed by the humiliated face of a woman shorn at the Liberation of France.

The controversial images have uncommon power. Helmut Newton’s image from 1975’s “Story of Ohhh . . . ” showing a sexually liberated woman sitting wide-legged on a sofa admiring a man’s body, outraged Vogue readers at the time.

So while our phones and lives overflow with images, this lavish book offers us a time to drink in an era in which the art of photography was a slower, more considered process, and to learn about its luminaries on the way.

Chronorama is published on March 30,  by Abrams, and is available for pre-order.

Book to see Chronorama at the Palazzo Grassi in Venice from March 12