Miles Aldridge's Erotic Dreams

British fashion photographer Miles Aldridge credits luck for the reason he became a photographer. Pitching photos of his girlfriend to become a model for British Vogue, the magazine’s editors ended up preferring his talent to her look. That was the mid-1990s and since then Aldridge’s career has skyrocketed. Working for Vogue Italia, Numero, Paradis, and The New York Times Magazine, he has established himself as an inventive artist with an acute sense of color and impeccable eye for style.

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The subject of a latest show at Steven Kasher Gallery in New York, Aldridge has been gathering art-world attention over the past few years with 2006 and 2008 solo shows at Galerie Alex Daniels-Reflex Amsterdam and a spring 2009 solo exhibition at Hamiltons in London. His work was also included in New York’s International Center of Photography group show, Weird Beauty: Fashion Photography Now, which took place earlier this year and featured avant-garde practitioners of the trade.

Aldridge’s show at Kasher, Pictures for Photographs, presents an overview of his erotically charged, surreal, cinematic, and pop imagery from the past eight years, along with drawings and sketches in notebooks used to plan the perfectly produced photographs. The exhibition features a selection of images from his new Edition 7L monograph, Karl Lagerfeld’s publishing imprint with Steidl. Lagerfeld had a hand in picking the whimsical sketches in the book, while Aldridge and the venerable German art publisher Gerhard Steidl selected the psychologically engaging, narrative prints.

The son of the celebrated illustrator and graphic designer Alan Aldridge—who’s been dubbed “the Man with the Kaleidoscope Eyes” because of his iconic Beatles album covers—Miles Aldridge has been lucky in love and art. Married to the former supermodel Kristen McMenamy, who occasionally pops up in his pictures, Aldridge is most fortunate to have a vivid imagination and an obsession for detail that delivers the final knockout punch in all of his super-smart imagery.

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Paul Laster is the editor of Artkrush.com, a contributing editor at Flavorpill.com and Art Asia Pacific, and a contributing writer at Time Out New York and Art in America.