Pictures That Burn the Page: A Seven Decade Trove of Condé Nast Photography Is Elevated to Art in Venice

Later we would see Stravinsky, Lee Miller (herself a Vogue photographer, of great bravery and renown), Greta Garbo, Joan Crawford, Elizabeth Taylor, and many more. Irving Penn’s extraordinary still lives are as artfully composed as any Old Master. There is the first Vogue-photographed cover girl, the biracial bisexual Toto Koopman, in August 1933. Onwards, slowly, unfolds a chronological window, via wartime, into the flowering of culture through the 1950s, ’60s, and ’70s featuring Karl Lagerfeld, Coco Chanel, Duke Ellington, Arthur Ashe, Veruschka, and Catherine Deneuve—all momentarily visible through the photographers’ original prints.

Interspersed with this expansively cast visual story are the works of four contemporary artists, Eric N. Mack, Giulia Andreani, Daniel Spivakov, and Tarrah Krajnak, which work to generate a 21st century imaginative angle on this mammoth retrospective. Krajnak, on site last night, explained that she is restaging and shooting photos from the exhibition and her own archive as a form of performative reconsideration, to generate fresh perspective.

Once the tour was done—and we lingered to look for so long that organizers dimmed the lights to shoo us onwards—guests gathered downstairs. They included Matthieu Blazy, Daniel Delcore, Marco De Vincenzo, Sara Battaglia, Francesco Ragazzi, Giuliano Calza, Gilda Ambrosio, and Giorgia Tordini.