“There weren’t many women photographers [in Paris], so there was a certain amount of freedom,” recalled Hanson. “Obviously there were the likes of Sarah Moon and Deborah Turbeville, very talented photographers, but their style was more contrived. I fell into fashion because all my friends were models, so I photographed them every day, getting dressed, hanging out.” That art of documentation was what informed her aesthetic. Recently, she was chatting to her friend the stylist Brana Wolf, who she worked with for many years, and it was Wolf who told Hanson, “Fashion was never your thing. Your thing was the girls, and their energy, and their lifestyle.”
That Hanson so could faithfully and conspiratorially convey that in her naturalistic, uncontrived images came from a place of friendship. “I never had a type to shoot,” she said. “It was really dependent on their personality. I had to have a rapport to tell their story. I would spend a lot of time just hanging out with them, asking questions: What are you doing, where are you going, who are you seeing? Everyone was more open then.”
It was, she says, a moment when she’d be in the legendary Paris hangout Davé (a favorite of Helmut Newton’s) with Love, or Helmut Lang, or John Galliano; a small, intimate world where work morphed into life and then back again. It was an era when you and a stylist and model were packed off with a suitcase of clothes, and asked to come back with great pictures. And there are plenty of those in this terrific book—yet another opportunity to marvel at the decade that’s gone, but so not forgotten.
Claudia Schiffer looking the epitome of the Riot Girl ’90s, albeit elevated: punkish mohair and plenty of attitude.
Photo: Courtesy of Pamela Hanson
