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Jan 23, 2024

Campy, sexy fun informs fashion photographer’s off

Curator and SCAD FASH creative director Rafael Gomes appears to have understood

Curator and SCAD FASH creative director Rafael Gomes appears to have understood the assignment in the exhibition "Ellen von Unwerth: This Side of Paradise," a raunchy, decadent, often goofy gambol through Paris-based fashion photographer Ellen von Unwerth's distinctive image bank and idiosyncratic style.

Fittingly, Gomes has outfitted the SCAD FASH space with glitter-encrusted walls, red carpeting, lurid pink lighting and iridescent fringe curtains you have to part like a perv to enter the galleries. A chaotic collision of soundtracks bleed out from the various short films on display, making you feel like a silver pinball pinging around in a peep show arcade.

Gomes’ set dressing complements von Unwerth's downtown NYC, pansexual, gender-bending, champagne and oysters, pink flamingos and leopard print vibe.

Credit: Ellen von Unwerth

Credit: Ellen von Unwerth

Now 69, for decades the former model has been quietly subverting fashion business-as-usual with her femme-forward take on sex and desire for the pages of Vogue, Vanity Fair and Elle magazines, and in her work for brands like Miu Miu, Guess and Dior. Though von Unwerth could certainly go high end, much of the work in "This Side of Paradise" has a more lowbrow bent, ripped from the outré pages of publications like Paper, King Kong, Hunger, Giant and Galore and reminiscent of the work of 1950s cheesecake model-turned-photographer Bunny Yeager and her work with Bettie Page.

"This Side of Paradise," a retrospective representing work from the early 1990s through 2022, focuses on short films and photographs that appear to have been selected for their party-all-the-time energy and debauchery. The show's title riffs off of Jazz Age party boy F. Scott Fitzgerald's debut novel with its blend of sex, drinking and ennui, though the lassitude is nowhere to be found in von Unwerth's unapologetic hedonism.

Von Unwerth's photographic identity is founded on letting her subjects — male and female, gay and straight — have fun with their sexuality. She subverts what academics call "the male gaze" with her more joyful, tongue-in-cheek attitude. That sense of fun extends to the photographer's visual database and pan-historical references from Weimar Germany to Mamie Van Doren, from Josephine Baker's Paris to the gay cruising of ‘70s New York. Von Unwerth's maximalist world is the fun-loving response to fellow German kink-master Helmut Newton, who is a visible influence. United in sex but divided in tone, Newton's high fashion photographs have a bell jar austerity, an onanistic sense of isolation. Von Unwerth's images are the inverse for allowing her subjects the chance to play rather than just act out the photographer's fantasies. In "This Side of Paradise" von Unwerth's subjects appear to be captured in the midst of the best party ever, their mouths wide open in gestures of demented glee.

Credit: Ellen von Unwerth

Credit: Ellen von Unwerth

The assembled images are campy and winking most often when featuring drag queens like Violet Chachki posing as sexy bunny "Miss Hippityhop" with a carrot clamped between her lips or posing coquettishly with — not one, but two — lollipops. In "Precious Luggage" Farrah Moan commands a bellhop's cart, wearing a cotton candy pink bouffant, tarantula eyelashes and a doorknob diamond ring in an image that pokes fun at the ludicrous cheesecake drag of men's magazines.

Where the campy fun gets a little wobbly is in some of those celebrity films and photographs where she hands out similar props and makeup and gets a totally different result. Men playing at being women in drag queen mode are potent analysts of the whole kit and caboodle of feminine wiles, including its more ludicrous contortions. But Paris Hilton or Christina Aguilera can't really "play" at hyperfeminity since that is part and parcel of female celebrity. The image of Hilton uncorking a wine bottle for a Guess campaign or Miley Cyrus "playing" a country bumpkin have a generic, lifeless "sexiness" that feels like von Unwerth lite.

Credit: Ellen von Unwerth

Credit: Ellen von Unwerth

The shining light amidst all the often wan celeb vamping is Coco Rocha, a tooth-picky model with some of the physicality of classic Hollywood comedians like Carole Lombard and Myrna Loy whose prat-falling allowed them to drop their glamorous masks. Playing off the tropes of Depression-era cinema, Rocha is a rich girl who falls from grace in a 2015 stylish short film "Egoiste" to become a high-style bag lady selling her Chanel bags on the street and schlepping her couture wardrobe in a shopping cart.

"Ellen von Unwerth: This Side of Paradise"

Through Jan. 8, 2024. 10 a.m.-5 p.m. Tuesdays-Saturdays; noon-5 p.m. Sundays. $10; $8 senior citizens/military; $20 family of three or more; $5 college students with ID and alumni; free for under age 14, SCAD students, staff, faculty and members. SCAD FASH Museum of Fashion + Film, 1600 Peachtree St. NW, Atlanta. 404-253-3132, scadfash.org.

Bottom line: Pearl-clutchers beware: Ellen von Unwerth's hedonistic photographs of drag queens and downtown role-playing are unbridled, sex-fueled fun.

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