ファッション写真の豊富な歴史を日本の家庭に紹介

The Domestic Stage opens with two images. The first is of queer British artist Jesse Glazzard and his then-partner Nora Nord in their London flat in 2019, dressed in costumes fashioned from McDonald’s boxes and plastic corner shop bags. The second is a still from a recent season of Keeping Up With the Kardashians, which sees Kim Kardashian surrounded by endless rails of clothes in her museum-like wardrobe in Los Angeles. Seemingly worlds apart, the two images have more in common than you might think. Both are acts of performance that reveal how the home is no longer simply a place of private reprieve, but a stage to enact ideas of fantasy, status and desire – and not just for celebrities or rising artists. With phones in hand, anyone can now perform on their own domestic stage, pushing swells of curated interiors on our feeds. As observed in Martina Mondadori’s recent piece, Home is the New Fashion on BoF, as social signifiers, our spaces have become just as powerful as what we wear. 

This shift is at the crux of Adam Murray’s extraordinary new book, which explores the role of the domestic interior in fashion photography from the 1990s to the present day. Navigating eras of social change, the birth of the internet and the ways Covid altered the parameters of fashion image-making, it reaches in various directions to unearth how the home serves as an arena for not just intimacy and belonging, but aspiration and performance. Tracing a journey through the past 30 years of contemporary culture, it positions established names – many with art practices, rather than figures native solely to fashion – like Takashi Homma and Sarah Jones alongside emerging talent pushing the domestic into new realms, from Clifford Prince King’s warm portraits of queer sanctuary to Ottilie Landmark’s subversive exploration of OnlyFans.

Murray is a curator and fashion image specialist whose work spans publications, exhibitions and teaching at Central Saint Martins. His past projects have focused on stories set in the North of England, from the zine series Preston is My Paris – which produced one of Jamie Hawkesworth’s best-loved early shoot at a Brutalist bus station – to the 2017 exhibition North: Fashioning Identity, co-curated with Lou Stoppard. While this book is his most far-reaching, it aptly began at home in Derbyshire as Murray looked through the extensive personal magazine archive he has been growing since he was a teenager. “This book started in 2017, when I became interested in Vogue Homme International and a specific period of that magazine art directed by Phil Bicker in the late 90s,” he says. Bicker was pioneering in commissioning both influential art figures and unknown graduates, from spotting Hannah Starkey out of the RCA to enlisting Tierney Gearon to shoot her own family in Ireland. “In my research, I noticed how fashion photography is often in the studio or the street,” says Murray. “But there was this third space where a lot of work was being made – the domestic.”

This observation took on new meaning during lockdown, as Murray’s students and the wider fashion industry were forced to create work from home. Leading his research in a new direction, the resulting book is as revelatory as it is thorough in its critical thinking. Rather than presenting a linear history of the home in fashion, Murray has structured it around three chapters – ‘Relationships’, ‘Performance and Control’ and ‘The Imagined Home’ – each opening with the work of a seminal image-maker who represents a pivot in fashion photography. There’s Tina Barney, who has spent her career documenting the upper echelons of East Coast elite behind closed doors; Carrie Mae Weems and the indelible legacy of her Kitchen Table Series; and Corinne Day’s anti-fashion images of Kate Moss in the flat she shared with Mario Sorrenti, which courted controversy in the British press but have circulated moodboards ever since. “Working with so many young image-makers, you see trends in terms of what people are putting in their research or what’s informing their work,” says Murray. “These are three people that constantly come up and it’s about trying to understand why that is.”

“The book argues that the home has become an extension of fashion beyond clothing – we’re buying things, shaping our spaces and broadcasting them everywhere” – Adam Murray

With Weems and Barney in particular – neither of them fashion photographers – Murray was keen to show that fashion doesn’t exist in a bubble, but is constantly shaped by and shaping culture more widely. “The Kitchen Table Series felt like such an important reference,” he says of Weems’ landmark work, which tells the story of the artist’s life through intimately staged portraits in her Massachusetts kitchen. “In the early 90s, it was quite radical for a Black female photographer to be making work in that context. This chapter of the book is about control and performance – the artist is both in the images and directing them, taking charge of her own representation while playing a role within a scene. That’s essentially what many younger image-makers are doing now with iPhones and the internet – they don’t need another photographer, they can create in their own space and it opens up far more possibilities for making work.”

Beyond Weems, Murray traces the early signs of this shift to Steven Meisel’s prophetic 2007 Vogue editorial Live On The Web, in which models photograph themselves with webcams. “That story is interesting because it’s one of the first editorials to mimic online culture and Instagram,” he says. “It feels almost naive, everyone’s having fun, and there’s none of the wariness we have around online culture today. But it begins to ask questions about the role of the photographer when everyone has iPhones to document themselves. Post-privacy is another theme, the erosion of the private. The book argues that the home has become an extension of fashion beyond clothing – we’re buying things, shaping our spaces and broadcasting them everywhere.”

From the start, Murray was set on including emerging names, many of whom were born in the midst of the timeframe the book documents. Whether using the technology of our times or rejecting it in search of simpler forms of human connection, their stories show how the domestic is a varied and fertile space for creation. One shoot sees Moni Haworth, Michele Mansoor and Zara Mirkin capture people found on Craigslist in their homes, while for others, like the Russia-born Maya Golyshkina, who creates surreal crafty performance art, the domestic is a space for self-invention. “I’m working with young people every day, so it’s an opportunity to argue that their work is just as relevant,” says Murray. “We don’t need another book full of those familiar names.”

While the book grapples with themes of privacy, technology, exclusivity and identity, at its simplest level, it reveals our collective obsession with the domestic – the banal and the beautiful things that unfold behind closed doors. Working on it, Murray says, has made him see the home in countless new ways. “The home is always going to be part of everyone’s lives,” he says. “What it means is totally different – from ideas of comfort and sanctuary to the reality that owning a home is increasingly difficult for young people. That’s why the interviews were so important. Jesse had a really beautiful quote about this notion of home: that it’s not a building or a roof, but the people you’re with.”

The Domestic Stage: When Fashion Image Comes Home by Adam Murray is published by Thames & Hudson and is out now. 

The Domestic Stage opens with two images. The first is of queer British artist Jesse Glazzard and his then-partner Nora Nord in their London flat in 2019, dressed in costumes fashioned from McDonald’s boxes and plastic corner shop bags. The second is a still from a recent season of Keeping Up With the Kardashians, which sees Kim Kardashian surrounded by endless rails of clothes in her museum-like wardrobe in Los Angeles. Seemingly worlds apart, the two images have more in common than you might think. Both are acts of performance that reveal how the home is no longer simply a place of private reprieve, but a stage to enact ideas of fantasy, status and desire – and not just for celebrities or rising artists. With phones in hand, anyone can now perform on their own domestic stage, pushing swells of curated interiors on our feeds. As observed in Martina Mondadori’s recent piece, Home is the New Fashion on BoF, as social signifiers, our spaces have become just as powerful as what we wear. 

This shift is at the crux of Adam Murray’s extraordinary new book, which explores the role of the domestic interior in fashion photography from the 1990s to the present day. Navigating eras of social change, the birth of the internet and the ways Covid altered the parameters of fashion image-making, it reaches in various directions to unearth how the home serves as an arena for not just intimacy and belonging, but aspiration and performance. Tracing a journey through the past 30 years of contemporary culture, it positions established names – many with art practices, rather than figures native solely to fashion – like Takashi Homma and Sarah Jones alongside emerging talent pushing the domestic into new realms, from Clifford Prince King’s warm portraits of queer sanctuary to Ottilie Landmark’s subversive exploration of OnlyFans.

Murray is a curator and fashion image specialist whose work spans publications, exhibitions and teaching at Central Saint Martins. His past projects have focused on stories set in the North of England, from the zine series Preston is My Paris – which produced one of Jamie Hawkesworth’s best-loved early shoot at a Brutalist bus station – to the 2017 exhibition North: Fashioning Identity, co-curated with Lou Stoppard. While this book is his most far-reaching, it aptly began at home in Derbyshire as Murray looked through the extensive personal magazine archive he has been growing since he was a teenager. “This book started in 2017, when I became interested in Vogue Homme International and a specific period of that magazine art directed by Phil Bicker in the late 90s,” he says. Bicker was pioneering in commissioning both influential art figures and unknown graduates, from spotting Hannah Starkey out of the RCA to enlisting Tierney Gearon to shoot her own family in Ireland. “In my research, I noticed how fashion photography is often in the studio or the street,” says Murray. “But there was this third space where a lot of work was being made – the domestic.”

This observation took on new meaning during lockdown, as Murray’s students and the wider fashion industry were forced to create work from home. Leading his research in a new direction, the resulting book is as revelatory as it is thorough in its critical thinking. Rather than presenting a linear history of the home in fashion, Murray has structured it around three chapters – ‘Relationships’, ‘Performance and Control’ and ‘The Imagined Home’ – each opening with the work of a seminal image-maker who represents a pivot in fashion photography. There’s Tina Barney, who has spent her career documenting the upper echelons of East Coast elite behind closed doors; Carrie Mae Weems and the indelible legacy of her Kitchen Table Series; and Corinne Day’s anti-fashion images of Kate Moss in the flat she shared with Mario Sorrenti, which courted controversy in the British press but have circulated moodboards ever since. “Working with so many young image-makers, you see trends in terms of what people are putting in their research or what’s informing their work,” says Murray. “These are three people that constantly come up and it’s about trying to understand why that is.”

“The book argues that the home has become an extension of fashion beyond clothing – we’re buying things, shaping our spaces and broadcasting them everywhere” – Adam Murray

With Weems and Barney in particular – neither of them fashion photographers – Murray was keen to show that fashion doesn’t exist in a bubble, but is constantly shaped by and shaping culture more widely. “The Kitchen Table Series felt like such an important reference,” he says of Weems’ landmark work, which tells the story of the artist’s life through intimately staged portraits in her Massachusetts kitchen. “In the early 90s, it was quite radical for a Black female photographer to be making work in that context. This chapter of the book is about control and performance – the artist is both in the images and directing them, taking charge of her own representation while playing a role within a scene. That’s essentially what many younger image-makers are doing now with iPhones and the internet – they don’t need another photographer, they can create in their own space and it opens up far more possibilities for making work.”

Beyond Weems, Murray traces the early signs of this shift to Steven Meisel’s prophetic 2007 Vogue editorial Live On The Web, in which models photograph themselves with webcams. “That story is interesting because it’s one of the first editorials to mimic online culture and Instagram,” he says. “It feels almost naive, everyone’s having fun, and there’s none of the wariness we have around online culture today. But it begins to ask questions about the role of the photographer when everyone has iPhones to document themselves. Post-privacy is another theme, the erosion of the private. The book argues that the home has become an extension of fashion beyond clothing – we’re buying things, shaping our spaces and broadcasting them everywhere.”

From the start, Murray was set on including emerging names, many of whom were born in the midst of the timeframe the book documents. Whether using the technology of our times or rejecting it in search of simpler forms of human connection, their stories show how the domestic is a varied and fertile space for creation. One shoot sees Moni Haworth, Michele Mansoor and Zara Mirkin capture people found on Craigslist in their homes, while for others, like the Russia-born Maya Golyshkina, who creates surreal crafty performance art, the domestic is a space for self-invention. “I’m working with young people every day, so it’s an opportunity to argue that their work is just as relevant,” says Murray. “We don’t need another book full of those familiar names.”

While the book grapples with themes of privacy, technology, exclusivity and identity, at its simplest level, it reveals our collective obsession with the domestic – the banal and the beautiful things that unfold behind closed doors. Working on it, Murray says, has made him see the home in countless new ways. “The home is always going to be part of everyone’s lives,” he says. “What it means is totally different – from ideas of comfort and sanctuary to the reality that owning a home is increasingly difficult for young people. That’s why the interviews were so important. Jesse had a really beautiful quote about this notion of home: that it’s not a building or a roof, but the people you’re with.”

The Domestic Stage: When Fashion Image Comes Home by Adam Murray is published by Thames & Hudson and is out now.