When Sam Taylor-Johnson first stepped into Coco Chanel´s Rue Cambon apartment five years ago to photograph the legendary space, it was never with the exhibition that opens this week at the Saatchi Gallery in mind.
Taylor-Johnson took on the project, which was originally to take a series of images for a Mademoiselle Chanel biography, with trepidation. "I went into it thinking, 'What am I doing? I'm not that interested in photographing inanimate objects'", she told us today during a tour of the exhibit, but then spent days "unearthing things I didn't think would be there".
 |
| Chanel Staircase |
"The light is so perfect there - it was so majestic and magical," Taylor-Johnson explained. "Sometimes photographing people is like pulling teeth, trying to get some sort of personality, and (Chanel) wasn't even there and there was oodles of personality."
The project evolved and it was Chanel creative director Karl Lagerfeld who saw the images and suggested that they should feature in a tome of their own. The idea of an exhibition was born.
 |
| Interior Design |
The 34 images on show act as a portrait of the designer through her possessions, whether it's her spirituality, reflected through the crystal balls that adorned her table, or the scattered tarot cards, or the items that would find themselves the inspiration for Chanel collections both past and present. On spotting the stars adorning a row of book spines, you can't help but think of Karl Lagerfeld's pre-autumn/winter 2014 collection.
 |
| Oriental Detail |
"This is my first exhibition of work for five years - it was quite strange to come out in this way and do something so different from my normal work," Taylor-Johnson told us, stressing how much she had enjoyed the long, "quiet process" of developing the exhibition in comparison to the "madness" of working on films.
No comments:
Post a Comment