Peter Fetterman Gallery

#Curated views

Part V: In full colour, and beyond

INTRODUCTION #PART I #PART II #PART III #PART IV #PART V

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The final chapter in our first curated pathway features three generations of photographers, each bringing their own unique perspective in glorious colour, and representing a major movement towards contemporary art practice: Norman Parkinson (1913-1990), Sarah Moon (b.1931) and Cig Harvey (b.1973).

Norman Parkinson was one of the twentieth century’s best-known fashion photographers. He was active for over 50 years, and was instrumental in taking portrait and fashion photography beyond the stiff formality of his predecessors - injecting an easy and casual elegance into his images. His impulsive and unstructured style forever changed the static, posed approach to fashion photography, while his enchanting, idiosyncratic persona charmed his sitters and projected an alluring and glamorous public image.

Sarah Moon orbits the worlds of art and fashion with a poetic and dream-like visual language that defies classification. Coming to prominence in the 1970s, she broke away from the eastablished traditions of 'Fashion Photography', choosing instead to investigate a world of her own invention and without compromise.

Cig Harvey fully immerses us in the world of art, manifesting a truly contemporary experience of life, love and loss - the languages of colour, flowers, memory and emotion.

Fashion has always been a measure of confidence, hopes and dreams; deeply connected to how we live now, the values we represent and what we aspire to. So it seems fitting to end our journey with 'Blue Violet', a series of work that responds so beautifully not only to personal loss, but the uncertain times we are all living through.

" 'Blue Violet' is about empathy and the vast potential of beauty - if only for a heartbeat or two - to bridge what seems more and more like irrevocable chasms"

(Jacoba Ubrist, from The Currency of Time, Blue Violet, Monacelli Press 2021)

Norman Parkinson (United Kingdom, 1913-1990)

"The world is my studio."

~ Norman Parkinson

In a career that spanned seven decades, Norman Parkinson dazzled the world with his sparkling inventiveness as a portrait and fashion photographer. His work provides a comprehensive and unique record of the development of fashion design, photography and modelling from the 1940’s to 1990. By charting the changing face of fashion through the twentieth century, Norman Parkinson’s work also serves as a hugely significant historical record and a reflection of the societal changes that shaped our modern culture. Parkinson worked for a wide range of publications, once declaring “a photographer without a magazine behind him is like a farmer without fields”. His long association with Vogue (working with Audrey Withers, Diana Vreeland and Grace Coddington amongst many others), and his numerous assignments for Harper’s Bazaar, Town & Country and other international magazines, brought him worldwide recognition. Parkinson’s work is still considered hugely innovative and his influence remains evident in the work of many contemporary photographers.

Sarah Moon (France, b.1941)

“I create situations that do not exist. I seek the truth from fiction”

~ Sarah Moon

There is no one quite like Sarah. She is in a class of her own. She has many imitators but there is no one out there who can create a universe that flows with beauty and dreams as well as she does. She started out a model and with dedication and hard work slowly built an esteemed reputation where every designer of note clamored to get her to collaborate with them and add that indefinable magic to their creations. You know you are in the presence of someone truly unique when you sitwith her in her dreamlike house in Paris. The first time I visited I could not believe I was in a house in the center of Paris.I felt I had been transported to a quiet sanctuary in the heart of a Lewis Carroll countryside, a place where imagination and ideas roam free.

Ethereal and elegant, Sarah Moon's photographs are almost abstract in their painterly qualities. Texture, surface, seeing, believing, dreaming; it is difficult to summarize their content without pointing to the evident romantic and melancholic mood that emanates from the work. There is no one working today who evokes more magic, mystery and beauty.

Cig Harvey (United Kingdom, b.1973)

"Three black anenomes. A colour so dark there's a weight to it. Blue-violet midnight still stained by the sunset. It's like throwing open the front door and whispering into the night. There are secrets in this colour"

~ Cig Harvey

Cig Harvey is a British-born artist and writer living in Maine, USA, and working in large-format color photography and poetry. Rich in implied narrative, saturated in color, and deeply rooted in the natural world, her work is devoted to the topic of what it is to feel.

Cig lives in a farmhouse in Maine with her husband Doug and daughter Scout. The slow passing of time and the natural surroundings of her rural home has made her alert to the magic in the mundane.

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