Meisel rarely exhibits publicly and has published very little – his decision to partake in Photo London marks a rare and significant moment
As a 12-year-old in New York, Steven Meisel cut school to hang out at photography studios, fascinated by people and the way his camera could hold them. One of his earliest photographs was of Twiggy, newly arrived in the city and not yet an icon. In 1993, he would photograph her again; the image now hangs in this year’s Photo London Master of Photography exhibition, of which Meisel is this year’s honoree, with a show built around his first professional engagement with a city he has long been obsessed with.
His capacity to find, and then bring into focus, something in a person that exists just beyond ordinary looking is what has made Meisel the most prolific and least visible fashion photographer of his generation. In a single year, he produced 28 Vogue covers, yet he has published just two books and had only a handful of public exhibitions, by choice. He does not speak in the press, and he has no social media presence, all of which heightens the sense of occasion around this exhibition.
“Steven’s agreement to present a group of London portraits is a rare and special thing for the fair,” says Michael Benson, co-founder of Photo London and curator of the Meisel exhibition, who previously worked with Meisel on a show for the Amancio Ortega Foundation in Spain and describes persuading him to exhibit again as something of a coup. The selection and sequencing of images remained firmly in Meisel’s hands throughout, “Even down to the night before we opened,” Benson recalls. For Meisel, the work is process and passion as much as product, kept on close guard, and entirely his own.
The centrepiece is Anglo-Saxon Attitude, a series Meisel shot for British Vogue with Isabella Blow, who cast it from her circle of London society girls. Among them: Stella Tennant, Honor Fraser, Lady Louise Campbell, Bella Freud – who has since summarised the spirit of the shoot as “you had to deconstruct your manners and be as rude as possible” – and Plum Sykes, photographed standing on a pub table in a silver bikini while jaded punters watched the football. Shooting across east and west London alike, Meisel made portraits of a city that was anarchic, funny and unbothered by the idea of being looked at. “As a Londoner, you get the references in the places he’s chosen,” says Benson.
The series was made on the back of the Sex book with Madonna, the first project that had given Meisel weeks rather than days to work, and which had sent him into his most prolific era. “It was the last really great set of classic portraits he made,” says Benson, “before he started getting involved in very big production numbers.” These images were made before the keystrokes of social media – the caption, the tag, the comment, the share. Meisel’s photographs have always stood completely on their own; each one a complete, dimensional world held in a single static frame – no small thing in an age of image overflow, where so few photographs cut through the noise at all.
At the opening, Bella Freud and Honor Fraser returned to give a talk and stand in front of the portraits in which they appear – images made when they were barely adults, in a city that barely resembles the one outside. Photo London has its own inflection point to reckon with, having recently moved from Somerset House to Olympia. “We are at the beginning of a new era,” says Benson. “He was at the beginning of an era where no one knew exactly what was going to happen.”
Steven Meisel: Master of Photography is on show at Photo London until 17 May 2026.
