MILES ALDRIDGE
Miles Aldridge (born 1964, London, England) is a British photographer and artist whose vividly saturated, psychologically charged images occupy a distinctive space between cinema, painting, and fashion photography. The son of the illustrator and art director Alan Aldridge, he studied illustration at Central Saint Martins before working as a music video director throughout the late 1980s and early 1990s. He turned to photography full-time in 1993, and by 1996 had begun a two-decade collaboration with Franca Sozzani, the legendary editor-in-chief of Vogue Italia, that would define his reputation internationally. Drawing on film noir, Pop Art, and religious iconography, Aldridge constructs meticulously staged scenes that explore the false promise of luxury and the assorted fictions of modern life.
One of the few photographers still working exclusively on film, Aldridge begins each image with a sketch, pre-visualising every element of composition, colour, and light before a frame is made. His fashion photography has appeared in Vogue, Harper’s Bazaar, The New Yorker, and The New York Times Magazine, among many others, and he has been commissioned by Tate Britain to create a photographic installation in response to Mark Gertler’s 1916 painting Merry-Go-Round. Major museum exhibitions include retrospectives at Fotografiska in Stockholm, New York, and Berlin, and I Only Want You to Love Me at Somerset House, London.
His work is held in the permanent collections of the National Portrait Gallery, London, the Victoria and Albert Museum, London, the British Museum, the Fondation Carmignac, Paris, and the International Center of Photography, New York.