Creating the look: Benini and fashion photography

Editorial

When: 31 July 2010 - February 2011
Where: Powerhouse Museum
Tickets: General Admission $10 adult, $5 child/student, $6 concession and $25 family. Powerhouse Museum members, children under 5, NSW Senior Card holders and pensioners free.

Before the Beninis, fashion photography in Australia was a bit of a staid affair. A formulaic approach until the 1950s gave us straight looking men in well-creased trousers, and overdressed elegant women, sporting antipodean imitations of dour Hollywood stares.

Husband and wife duo Bruno and Hazel Benini strode into this establishment party - he a refined and reckless Italian photographer, she a New Zealand born stylist. They injected personality into fashion photography, and in such bucket-loads that their photographs still jump out of the page decades later.

Masters of the perfect shot, Bruno and Hazel could read the client, the model and the audience to produce the right blend of seduction, cheek, surprise and delight for whatever product they were hired to help sell. A hosiery ad photographed from beneath a desk - showed only a pair of legs emerging from a skirt (which was a saucy way of saying just enough and so much more). The 1968 image of Jacky Holme in Hendrix wig and glasses was the face of a youth label, and simply shouts "Look at me!" One couldn't glance over a Benini photograph - the viewer's eyes always lingered long enough to register (and in advertising, that's the point).

It is no coincidence that there is something recognisable in the Beninis' work - their style has formed the basis for almost every fashion photographer since the mid-century.

The Powerhouse Museum has recently acquired Bruno Benini's body of work - a treasure chest of stills tracing Australian glamour in fashion and celebrity for over half a century. It is to be exhibited alongside significant works by the following generation of fashion photographers, and the legacy of the Beninis is evident in the way they inspired those who followed them to both imitate and innovate.

The Beninis let the genie out of the bottle - Australian fashion photography has never looked back, and it now enjoys unprecedented artistic licence. Also in this exhibition (which is part of the Powerhouse Museum's Sydney Design, 2010 festival), contemporary innovators Juli Balla, Edward Coutts Davidson and Fernando Frisoni are featured, and works by many new-media artists reveal the techniques of fashion photography in the digital era.

Robert Stevenson, Citysearch