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15 Fashion Photographers Every Creative Should Study
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items As a Cape Town photographer and cinematographer, these are the fashion image-makers I keep going back to whenever I need a jolt of inspiration. From Avedon's white-backdrop energy to Tim Walker's fairy-tale sets and Trevor Stuurman's bold South Afric...
Start with ‘Dovima with Elephants’ and his portraits against plain white. Avedon made fashion move: models jumping, laughing and running instead of standing stiff, with every ounce of personality on show. Try it: put your subject on a seamless white ...
Richard Avedon
The master of simplicity. Penn's elegant Vogue work, his still lifes and his famous ‘corner’ portraits, where subjects were squeezed between two angled walls, show how much you can do with one soft light and nothing else. Try it: prop two white board...
Irving Penn
Bold, cinematic and unapologetically provocative. Newton photographed powerful women like film stills, often with hard flash, in settings that were either luxurious or gritty. Study how he used location and graphic shadow to build tension. Try it: sh...
Helmut Newton
Lindbergh stripped fashion back to raw, honest black and white: windswept beaches, minimal make-up and almost no retouching. His 1990 British Vogue cover of five supermodels helped define an era. Study how he let real faces and texture tell the story...
Peter Lindbergh
Bourdin's surreal, hyper-saturated images for French Vogue and Charles Jourdan shoes turned fashion ads into mysterious little stories. Glossy reds, cropped bodies and strange, unsettling scenarios make his work instantly recognisable decades later. ...
Guy Bourdin
Pure fairy tale. Walker builds giant, handmade sets (towering dolls, flying teacups, enchanted forests) and shoots them for Vogue with a storyteller's imagination. He's proof that ideas and art direction matter more than gear. Study his sense of scal...
Tim Walker
Dreamy, painterly and quietly haunting. Roversi famously shot on large-format Polaroid with long exposures, ‘painting’ his subjects with a torch in a dark studio, which gives his images their soft, ghostly glow. Study his patience and his colour pale...
Paolo Roversi
From Rolling Stone to Vanity Fair and Vogue, Leibovitz shoots celebrity portraits like Renaissance paintings: moody, soft directional light and big, story-driven sets. Her behind-the-scenes book ‘Annie Leibovitz at Work’ is a masterclass in itself. S...
Annie Leibovitz
Meisel shot every single Vogue Italia cover for about two decades and discovered or championed many of the biggest supermodels. He's a chameleon: glamorous one month, political or conceptual the next. Study his casting and art direction, not just his...
Steven Meisel
A true pioneer. Knight founded SHOWstudio and helped invent the fashion film, pushing photography into motion, digital manipulation and live-streamed shoots long before everyone else. If you shoot both stills and video like I do, his work is essentia...
Nick Knight
The Dutch photographer, who spent part of her childhood in Kenya, turns harsh sun into her signature: deep graphic shadows, saturated colour and bodies arranged like sculpture. Her work is a lesson for anyone shooting under strong African light. Try ...
Viviane Sassen
In 2018, aged 23, Mitchell became the first Black photographer to shoot a cover of American Vogue, photographing Beyoncé for the September issue. His work is soft, sunlit and joyful, celebrating Black beauty and leisure in a way fashion rarely had be...
Tyler Mitchell
Our own. Stuurman is a South African photographer, filmmaker and creative director whose bold, colourful and proudly African imagery has taken him from local streets to international campaigns and magazines. He's living proof that world-class fashion...
Trevor Stuurman
The anti-glamour rebel. Teller photographs models and celebrities with harsh on-camera flash and a deliberately raw, snapshot feel, and his long-running Marc Jacobs campaigns proved that imperfection can sell luxury. Study how he makes the unexpected...
Juergen Teller
The man who took fashion out of the studio. From the 1930s onwards, Parkinson photographed models striding down streets, leaping in the countryside and posing in exotic locations for Vogue and Harper's Bazaar, when everyone else shot stiff studio por...
Norman Parkinson