December, 29th, 2014

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PAN-ARABISM SCHAFFENSFREUDE

A major figure in European #fashion #pho tography from the 1950’s through the 1970’s, Gundlach made a number of trips through the Middle East during a golden age of travel and cosmopolitanism throughout the region. In Lebanon, Gundlach captured a key moment of glamour with pho tographs taken throughout Beirut, in Baalbeck, and on the wings of a PanAm airplane at the Beirut Airport. In Egypt, Gundlach’s images paired the geometric look of “mod” fashion, with a backdrop of the pyramids, pharaonic ruins andthe desert dunes.. These black and white images show the Middle East as a junction of contrasts: at once modern and traditional, rough and refined, cosmopolitan and exotic.

#Gundlach conveys in his dynamic and beautiful images some of the aura of that golden age. “My background is reportage, for me it’s very important to show something other than just the clothes”. He lensed cultures beyond fashion trends of aesthetics, and femininity. Travelling to #Lebanon and #Egypt, Gundlach visited the main his toric sites like the Giza pyramids and the Beiteddine palace, but he shied away from any #orientalist reflexes that would have had languorous reclining models dressed in opulent kaftans of another time; instead the girls were sporting the latest fashions, often short skirts or even swimsuits, in active poses that mirror the growing emancipation of women at the time. So impressed was Gundlach with what he saw, that he returned several times in the course of the next ten years for European fashion magazines in search of original and sunny destinations to shoot the latest collections by the likes of @Dior @CourregesParis and @EmilioPucci ..

#Gundlach also echoed the optimism of the period by choosing to shoot in less obvious places like Oscar Niemeyer’s International Fair built in the northern Lebanese city of Tripoli or Beirut’s Phoenicia hotel – two modernist architectural signatures. Widely acknowledged as the pre-eminent German fashion pho tographer of the post-war period, Gundlach’s images traced the changing culture and style of the mid-20th Century in over 300 magazine covers.

#BEIRUT #BERLIN #MODEDIPLOMATIQUE