Obituary: David Seidner

OSTENTATIOUSLY YOUNG deaths amongst over-talented males seem of another era, and the loss of David Seidner at 42 feels somehow very mid- Eighties. Seidner had indeed been living with Aids since 1984 and his relative longevity may be proof of his energy and stamina as well as medical advances, but he was also a courageous fighter against the stereotypes of the illness and its attendant culture.

If Seidner's death appears oddly historic, albeit a history that only goes back 15 years, that would be appropriate. For unlike most fashion photographers Seidner was passionately interested in the past, and the history of both photography and fine art informed his aesthetic, whether ancient Greek sculpture, 19th-century salon portraiture or pre-war haute couture. Seidner was an "artist-photographer", whose large body of work for magazines and advertising was as inventive and creative as his more personal projects.

His precocious career, of as many museum shows as books, catalogues, editorial and advertising awards, started early, as precocity will. He was born in Los Angeles in 1957, and had his first magazine cover at the age of 19.

This was in Paris, where from then on he loved to work and live, shuttling between America and Europe all his working life. His first solo show was also in Paris, at La Remise de Parc in 1978, and the following year he was in "Artists by Artists" at the Whitney Downtown, New York, followed by a string of shows including one at Manhattan's avant-garde the Clock Tower in 1981. The subsequent glamour - and money - of Seidner's career obscures his genuine involvement in contemporary art at its most experimental as well as modish.

Seidner's signature technique of taking portraits from above with a telephoto lens to equalise the distortion was developed from a shoot with his philosophic mentor, the composer John Cage. Interviewing Cage for the Los Angeles Times on an early assignment, Seidner only had a telephoto lens, so rather than attempting a full-length portrait he took five different shots and combined them later.

Fragmentation, super-imposition, and multiple exposure became Seidner's style, first seen in Britain in a photoshoot in Harper's & Queen in 1986, in which models and dresses were shown only as reflected in broken shards of mirror. "Smuggling art on to the printed page" was Seidner's aim though he was perfectly aware of the Philistine milieu: "Vogue reduces old masters to `Elegance in Art'. People don't go to the bathroom, they don't have nervous breakdowns, there is no alcoholism, it is a hermetically sealed world . . ."

Seidner worked continually throughout his career for magazines such as Vogue (Italian, French and American), The New York Times, Harper's Bazaar and Vanity Fair, for which he recently shot descendants of Sargent portraits made-up and photographed as if by Sargent; it was a quintessentially Seidner story. He also created advertising campaigns for Bill Blass, Bergdorf Goodman, Revlon, L'Oreal and Yves Saint Laurent, where he was under contract in the Eighties.

Closer to his own interests was work as a contributing editor to the small New York publication Bomb. It was for Bomb in 1984 that he interviewed the legendary model Lisa Fonssagrives; she was 72 and he 27. In this piece he reflected his fascination with the world of pre-1960s fashion, an era he eloquently mourned, writing: "Gone the days of a finely crafted gown, of an entire day to do one photograph, of the woman who can best do her own make-up. Gone the notion of a well-turned ankle."

Seidner was fascinated by great models of earlier eras and as an enthusiastic historian and lecturer predated current cultural studies of fashion micro-history. His last book was Lisa Fonssagrives: three decades of classic fashion photography (1996) which he originated, edited and designed. In his introductory essay "Still Dancing" he said of her: "Over an eight-year period, I was blessed with having this miraculous spirit grace my life, our connection often seemed telepathic. She called it a special deep friendship and I thought it more like a platonic love affair."

The essay is also revealing of his own moody nature: "my serious and sometimes depressive character . . . born with an old soul". Indeed a key to his cultivation of past legends and his pessimism is suggested by his "writing in my journal that the romantic was constantly endowing others with the qualities that he needed most, and as a result, constantly disappointed".

Seidner had a long list of publications, beginning in Paris in 1983 with Les Cahiers de L'Energumene and including Moments de Mode (Herscher, 1986), Eiko & Coppola on Dracula and a volume of studio shots of artist friends, The Face of Contemporary Art. He conceived and designed the eponymous volume David Seidner (Schirmer/Mosel, 1989), with an exemplary essay by Patrick Mauries, "Fragments on Fragments": "Seidner's photography belongs from every point of view to the tradition of the grand formal portrait which can be traced back, long before the golden age of fashion photography, to the society painting of the turn of the century".

This text explains Seidner's system of long exposures, "allowing the body to show itself, to unfold in its own time, to fall into its own elegance". The book features Seidner portraits of such luminaries as Brice Marden, Christopher Isherwood, Philip Glass and Alberto Moravia. There is also a suitably homoerotic image of Robert Mapplethorpe from 1978 when Seidner was just 20.

Mauries also makes a crucial point about Seidner's neo- classicism: "What might be regarded as Seidner's formalism - the extreme refinement of his compositions, his fondness for a linear, calligraphic definition of the body". This is evident in Seidner's sculptural nudes, which he exhibited at the Robert Miller gallery in New York and published as a book (Nude) with Gina Kehayoff in 1995. He explained what he sought: "The right moment. What the Greeks called Kairos, an abstracted reality. I do not attempt to express anything."

Perhaps Seidner's most charming book was of a series of miniature wire fashion models from 1946, Le Theatre de la Mode (Du May, 1990) which he photographed at night (as Paris couture was once photographed), when "silence and isolation" accentuated their theatricality. The tones provided by his favoured Paris lab, Central Color, were particularly evocative - indeed, Schneider's colour-work as opposed to his self-consciously avant- garde black-and-white may prove to be his finest.

Seidner's French was sufficiently expert for him to write for French Vogue, along with essays including his essay in Theatre de la Mode entitled "La repetition".

Seidner was of course as active a socialite as a career-photographer, with the proviso that his snobbery was of the preferable genre that pursues the artistically and intellectually gifted rather than merely rich or titled. Sitting at Cafe Flore, say, after the opening of the Picasso Museum, he greeted Paloma Picasso: "Oh Paloma, we've just been at your daddy's museum." Seidner ended up knowing his cultural obsessions simply by dint of wanting it enough. His friend the painter Ross Bleckner called Seidner:

The Energizer-Bunny. He had such amazing energy. He was always fascinated with art and artists, he loved contemporary work but was a formalist, a classicist. He was collecting art from an early age, trading, buying when he could. The fact that he had to make his living as a commercial photographer, well, perhaps he wasn't always thrilled by that. Perhaps he always wanted to be taken more seriously as the artist he was.

Seidner was a member of the board of the Community Research Initiative on Aids and his portraits of celebrities with Aids were used in advertising for Aids research. But he also was scathing about "red-ribbon" platitudes, notably in an essay he wrote for The New Yorker in 1993.

Last year he was honoured with the Eisenstaedt Award for Portrait Photography by Columbia University whilst next year there will be a retrospective of his work at La Maison Europeene de la Photographie in Paris. Perhaps the best description of David Seidner's work comes from himself: "Little about photography is true of course, except that it serves up artifice and fantasy as truth. In these half-truths, we can only hope to ascertain glimpses of reality, reflections of a troubled or ideal world."

David Seidner, photographer and writer: born Los Angeles 1957; died Miami Beach, Florida 6 June 1999.