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In the spring of 2020, as the world adjusted to the reality of the pandemic, Gavin Bond decamped to a log cabin upstate and began sorting through his photographic archives. Among the images that he dug up? Claudia Schiffer celebrating with Gianni Versace after storming the runway, Kate Moss modelling Vivienne Westwood’s Café Society collection for spring/summer 1994, and Karl Lagerfeld touching up Stella Tennant’s geometric bob with hairspray before a Chanel spectacular. Now, his buried fashion treasure is going on display at Hamiltons Gallery in London, with IDEA Books publishing a corresponding volume, Being There.
“It’s crazy really, because I sort of fell into photography by accident,” Bond reflects now. “As a student in my early 20s, I managed to get backstage after the Anglomania collection, and I somehow got some of my images published in The Times. Vivienne Westwood spotted them and loved them, and from then on I got to hang around with the models, even when all the other photographers had to leave, really.” The supers took the 22-year-old under their wing, with Bond remaining close to the likes of Naomi Campbell and Christy Turlington to this day. Next year he plans to travel with them for their upcoming AppleTV+ docuseries, The Supermodels, helmed by Oscar-winner Barbara Kopple. “We’re all running around Europe together again, 30 years later,” Bond says with a laugh.
Notably, not a single photograph in Being There has been retouched, nor has Bond cropped anything. “It’s a little time capsule,” he explains. “I’ve even left the red eye in on certain pictures. It came from this little ring flash I had back then for when I shot in dark corridors and that sort of thing.” In the coffee table book, full-page images are also juxtaposed with the photographer’s annotated scrapbooks – each one filled with captures of almost impossibly beautiful humans nursing glasses of Moët & Chandon and shimmying in and out of couture gowns. In the long-term, Bond hopes much of the collection might end up in the V&A, assuming there are any prints left after fashion devotées visit Being There. Moss, for one, has already bought a portrait of herself – and what better endorsement could a fashion photographer ask for than that?
Being There is open now at Hamiltons Gallery.
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