Les Rencontres d'Arles Rencontres d'Arles: expositions, stages photo /exhibitions, photo workshops.

The history of fashion photography has focused more on its styles and aesthetic trends than its uses. There is no such thing as fashion photography in its own right, worthy of appearing in the fashion magazines and the all too rare books devoted to the discipline. Up and downstream of the ‘composed’ variety there exists a broad range of uses, unchanged since the 60s, in which reportage and documentary serve as a tool, a medium and an outcome for seasonal fashion.

As more and more fashion shows began happening after the 80s in the major creative and fashion market centres – Paris, Milan, New York – the number of fashion show photographers grew considerably.

Sprinkled around the salons in the 50s, invited a day later than the clients – given first rights to the new collections – and scattered anarchically around improvised catwalks in the 70s and 80s, photographers are now faced with unflappable mannequins whose presentation of the style of the moment they have to catch for their various magazines.

Guy Marineau is among those who have been travelling the world since the 70s and pinning down collections from one season to the next. After a spell with fashion publishers WWD and W at the Fairchild Group in Paris, Marineau moved to Condé Nast in 1986, working out of Vogue‘s Paris office. Collection after collection, season after season and from haute couture to ready-to-wear, he continuously produced fashion and show images that went out to the world in print and on the Internet. Working with all the fashion houses from the most famous to the barely emergent, he has accumulated an enormous store of images, documentary material that nonetheless represents a history of contemporary fashion.

For the first time ever, via the Guy Marineau archive, an ideal juke-box of the most momentous fashion shows of the last four decades is on offer here, in order of the most crucial showings by each couturier and designer.

Olivier Saillard, exhibition curator.

Executive producer: Le Tambour qui parle.

Guy Marineau

Born in 1947 in Saint-Germain-en-Laye, France.

He spent his childhood in Orthez in the Pyrénées-Atlantiques region, and began studying photography at Studio Alpy in Tarbes in 1965. He gained vocational diplomas; then, in July 1970, moved to Paris and worked in the photographic laboratory of Groupe Réalités - Connaissance des Arts. In 1972, editorial departments began to give him reporting assignments. In August 1975, he joined the Paris bureau of Fairchild Publications as a staff photographer, working for two fashion titles, WWD and W. In parallel, he worked for couture houses Chanel, Dior, Christian Lacroix, Yves Saint Laurent, Emanuel Ungaro and Karl Lagerfeld. In March 1986 he left Fairchild for Condé Nast, and spent 14 years in the Paris bureau of American Vogue. He has since freelanced for couture and prêt-à-porter houses. In 1997 he held his first exhibition of fashion-show images at the Nancy Biennale on the theme of fashion with Jeanloup Sieff. A year later, he showed his Tokyo catwalk pictures in Japan. In 2005 he published his first book, Le Palace: Remember, with Jean Rouzeaud (Éditions Hoebeke).

EXHIBITIONS