Inside The V&A's Horst: Photographer Of Style Exhibition

The V&A´s forthcoming exhibition, Horst: Photographer Of Style, holds a special place in the photography world - its subject  Horst P Horst was, a Vogue contributor and close friend of the Condé Nast family. But as the expansive retrospective reveals, there was a lot more to the legendary photographer than that.

"Fashion was at the heart of what he did, but there is so much more," curator Susanna Brown told us yesterday as we got a private tour of the exhibition before its grand opening on Saturday. "The travel, the close-ups, the home and garden shots - they all deserve attention. The funny thing is that for Horst, there were very few "off days" and so it was hard to condense!"

A Collection Of Hort´s Work

With 10 rooms and over 400 objects, the comprehensive exhibition certainly shows the full spectrum of Horst's work. It takes the visitor from his early days working in Paris to his arrival in America just before the war, where he whole-heartedly embraced the new mediums of photography and the intensity of colour. For Brown, one of the most important elements of curating the exhibition was to strike a harmonious balance to highlight the between the juxtapositions in his life.

"Horst went from pre-war haute couture to post-war ready-to-wear; from black and white to colour; from Paris to New York - no other photographer documented that period with the same dedication of Horst, he was just constantly producing," said Brown.

Key Photographic Campaigns

Presenting such an archive was no easy feat. Together with her designers Katharina Weistroffer, Clara Sancho and DHA Designs, Brown rose to the challenge of masterminding the space by immersing herself in Horst's world.

"Design is integral to our exhibitions and I really wanted the visitor to feel completely immersed and transported to Horst's world as soon as they came in, evoking the notion of Horst as a young man in his thirties working late into the night in his apartment high above the Champs- Elysées in Paris," Brown explained. "He was a master of light and shadows, and it's important that the space reflects that."