It was back in 2008 that we were first approached by international design, fashion and lifestyle magazine Wallpaper* to see if we’d be interested in working with them, and a few months later Wallpaper* Selects was born, a collaboration that saw the publication of ten exclusive limited edition photographs from the magazine’s archives.
For me, it was a fantastic project to be involved in as I love great photography, and going through their collection of photographic images at IPC head-quarters on London’s South Bank with the photography editor was anything but a chore. As all the works had been commissioned especially to appear in specific features in the magazine over the years, they had only ever been presented as editorials and never as ‘art’, so it was an exciting prospect for both the magazine and for each of the eight the photographers involved.
Although it was very enjoyable and insightful, trawling through photograph after photograph was quite a task; so many of the images I could imagine as a limited edition print hanging on the wall of someone’s home, and we could only choose ten. So the editor and I selected the images we thought worked the best, both as stand alone pieces and as a series. Anyone who is familiar with Wallpaper* will know that it celebrates all areas of innovative design, so we really wanted to show this in the collection. Jonathan Frantini’s now sold out
Cintia 1 was part of a fashion shoot (featuring well-known Brazilian model Cintia Dicker), however, perfectly composed using the angular construction of this fantastic building in Arizona to create a dynamic ‘movie set’ atmosphere, this image has an iconic feel to it that oozes style, sophistication and is a fantastic observation of a great piece of architecture. The photograph originally appeared on the cover of Wallpaper* in September 2005.
State of the art interior design is another area often focussed on in the magazine, and works such as Christopher Griffiths’
BMW Welt and Jonathan de Villiers’
Manila are great examples of this, along with Mauricio Alejo’s
Stack which sees the photographer present a series of white furniture in a clean white room in an unconventional way to create an interesting image; balanced, grounded and central, there’s something rather satisfying about this piece.
In
Cintia II, which is from the same Arizonian photo shoot as Cintia I, Jonathan Frantini presents Cintia this time in a more rural setting with no man-made structures in sight as he crosses the boundaries between fashion and landscape photography. Other landscape works include Jonathan de Villiers’ stunning representation of a sun-bleached
Cape Town; Joel Tettamanti’s breathtaking view of a mountainous
Conn, Switzerland and Stefan Ruiz’s
Billboard, Pan Americana Highway, which shows a broken beer advert on the open road, like a mirage in the desert. Large in scale these three works are amongst my favourites in the series.
Another great image and one of the most iconic of the series I think is Benedict Redgrove’s
Carabo. Shot at the private Bertone museum in Italy, it features the Alfa Romeo Carabo, one of a number of radical one-off concept cars that are exhibited in the space for invitees to view.
The only still-life and the smallest work in the series is Daneil Stier’s
Telephone which features a prototype telephone photographed in an experimental academy and think-tank outside Milan. Although the main subject is intriguing and a little confusing (a retro-style telephone with no dials or buttons), this is off-set by the placing of the objects in red which help create a perfectly composed image that is well-balanced and pleasing to the eye.
See all ten works in the series
here.