Photo provocateurs

IT’S about time fashion photography was embraced by the art world.

Next month, the work of 20 of the world’s top fashion photographers will be exhibited as part of the influential Art Basel event in Miami Beach. Curated by Marion de Beaupre (who has assembled similar shows in Paris, London and Hamburg), “In Fashion ‘07” will be the most comprehensive amalgam of fashion photography ever seen in the U.S.

“Fashion photography is, to me, really the best documentation of any era,” De Beaupre says. “I wanted really well-known photographers, but it was more important that everyone’s own style and the spirit of their time was represented.”

One work that will be on view is “Mutants #3” (1994), a photo composite depicting downtown Los Angeles being destroyed by nukes while a superhero-type woman looks on. The photographer, Seb Janiak, is a professed science-fiction nut and a master of creating new, often post-apocalyptic worlds in his images. For “Mutants #3,” created as a part of series for a magazine that never made it to print, he mashed a cityscape he captured from a helicopter together with a studio shot of model Sofia Boutella (a dancer for Madonna and a model for Nike). The too-real-for-comfort mushroom clouds and ground explosions were generated digitally.

At the time, “I was feeling frustrated with not being able to tell stories in photos like we do in the movies,” said Janiak, who counts the “X-Men” movies as inspiration. Another influence in this shot, no doubt, was his graceful model, Boutella.

“You should see the way she moves,” he says. “I started imagining scenes with her as though it were an action, sci-fi movie.”

Other artists featured in the show, which runs Dec. 2 to 9, include Miles Aldridge, Jean-Baptiste Mondino, David Seidner, Ali Mahdavi, Ellen Von Unwerth, Stephane Sednaoui and Elaine Constantine. Prints from younger photographers will start at $3,000, and large-format photographs from legends such as Serge Lutens are expected to fetch up to $25,000.