Miles Aldridge: Short Breaths at Brancolini Grimaldi ǀ Exhibition review

Short Breaths at Brancolini Grimaldi is an exhibition of photographic works by Miles Aldridge planned to coincide with Aldridge’s other new exhibition I Only Want You to Love Me at Somerset House.

Short Breaths brings together a collection of large-scale prints, all of which explore the darker side of Aldridge’s work for the fashion industry.

Although several images in the exhibition are the same as those featured in I Only Want You to Love Me, overall there is a glossier, sleeker, yet more disturbing feel to the pieces in this show. As Aldridge himself has explained: “A slightly uncomfortable quality is what I’m after. I don’t feel like making happy pictures about beautiful models being content…they’re pictures of humans not mannequins. They’re troubled, wounded and confused.”

Aldridge became a photographer in the mid 90s and has since produced commissions for many well-known magazines including Vogue Italia, The New Yorker and The New York Times.

Short Breaths includes images from The Dead, a series which features haunting women in elaborate gowns, who often appear detached from their surroundings and each other. It is this emotional distance that Aldridge’s work seems to focus on and in many of the pieces, although the model is physically in the frame, it’s easy for the viewer to imagine that her mind and heart are elsewhere.

If anything, colour is even more central to the works in Short Breaths than it is in I Only Want You to Love Me. The featured prints from Aldridge’s new limited edition portfolio Carousel are particularly eye-catching as they are displayed in bright, complementary frames. The open space of Brancolini Grimaldi, with its large windows and natural lighting, also helps the colours to dazzle.

Short Breaths is an interesting and thought-provoking examination of fashion, beauty and glamour. The show can be highly recommended to anyone interested in fashion or portrait photography, or to anyone who has been to I Only Want You to Love Me and wants to see more of Aldridge’s work.

Melanie Weaver

Short Breaths is on at Brancolini Grimaldi until 28^th September 2013. For further information visit the gallery’s website here.