Horst: Photographer of Style

6 Sep 2014-4 Jan 2015

Overview

This autumn the V&A will present the definitive retrospective of the work of Horst P. Horst (1906-99), one of the 20th century’s master photographers. The exhibition shows Horst's fashion photography of couturiers such as Chanel, Schiaparelli and Vionnet in 1930s Paris as well as Horst's early experiments with colour techniques and his meticulously composed, artfully lit images for magazines such as Vogue. The exhibition will display Horst’s best known photographs alongside unpublished and rarely exhibited vintage prints, conveying the diversity of his output, from surreal still lifes to portraits of Hollywood stars, nudes and nature studies to documentary pictures of the Middle East. It will examine his creative process through archive film footage, original contact sheets, sketchbooks and letters and will include a recreation of Horst’s 1940s studio.