Fast Forward

In October 1996, the hugely enjoyable Italian tabloid photo-journal Evatremila ran a special 'Adultery' edition. The magazine - Paris Match meets Celebrity Sleuth - opens with standard champagne-and-glamorous-teeth pictures. In this instance, they are of Princess Stephanie of Monaco with her racing-driver husband Daniel Ducruet. What follows is a blow-by-blow account of an hour in the life of Ducruet's most notorious indiscretion - with a former Miss Topless Belgium, Fili Houteman.

The location is an undisclosed playground at Cap Villefranche, but the mise-en-scène of the photo assignment belongs less to the granite walls and terracotta pool-tiles of the Mediterranean resort than to the foreshortened space of a long-lens probe. Here, the carnal theatre of a real-time amorality play unfolds. Attended by bodyguards and floozies, the French playboy conducts proceedings with Gallic aplomb. The lens closes in on the moment as it backs away from it, leaving a trail of sequential images, artlessly rendered within a collapsed field. The bare landscape marks only the incessance of procedure, the relentless click of the shutter in pursuit of the next frame. This kind of disconnection between subject and context has now become an integral part of the magazine. Meaning is on an instalment plan, the big picture nothing more than a parade of small details.

Sometime during the following year, Stephen Meisel shot an 'Untitled' story for Italian Vogue, which ran in the May issue as 16 uninterrupted double-page spreads. Again, the location was the 'anywhere' of telephoto compression, suggesting an abstract, fugitive and hysterical glamour. Across this whirlwind placelessness, Audrey Marney models a kind of feral asceticism - a latter-day St Joan cast from the studio into the wilderness of a lunar blur. With no place to hide she appears as much a victim of the long lens as of the fashion she carries on her back, a runaway trapped in the compressed space of the image. The sequence follows her frame by frame, outfit by outfit as she attempts to flee the narrow band of a depthless field.

Her predicament perfectly mirrors that of the photography that called it into being. It suggests a running out of contexts, a headlong stumble through the flash of the white-studio cube to the street, to the dirty realism of motel rooms and studio apartments and back to the antiseptic bunker of today's fashion. Even the whiteness of the clothes - the postal-service sackcloth seams of a smock pulled over bare legs and fur-trimmed moon boots - calls to mind the straitjacketing of an institution, the fashion-parole of the convict. Hunted by the lens she is cast as the beautiful one who flew over the cuckoo's nest and never looked back. Not far behind her, Nurse Ratchet waits to re-dress the asylum.

Meisel's spread for Italian Vogue captured and distilled the pilotless narrative photography of Evatremila's paparazzi carnage. Boldly standing apart from the other editorial, it was a story about nothing other than the isolated figure simultaneously brought close by the real-time sequence and distanced by the remote control. The series was eerie and beautiful. Audrey flees from the handbag-bangs-heels-taxi-hailing paradigm of the jaunty snapshot aesthetic like a wild animal caught in the headlights of fashion's past. Unravelling away from the social dictates of wealth, class and taste, the story disappears out of frame and into a surrounding landscape of bare nothingness. Like the photo-journalism from which they derive, these images restore to the medium a sense of provenance - that of the life-span and format of the magazine.

Meisel's heritage might well be Warhol and Avedon, the generation from which he is distanced by one remove. Relentlessly prolific, the Meisel studio has become to fashion what the Factory was to art. In his black-and-white images of the supermodel trinity - Linda, Christy and Naomi - pure style became its own form of celebrity, just as decades previously, images of Marilyn, Liz and Jackie had factured celebrity into pure style. Levitated by technical perfection, Meisel's portraits are like Avedon's Dovina - irresistible, flawless and mute. Meisel could have quit there, were it not for the fact that style stops for no one. But by moving seamlessly from the iconographic to the iconoclastic - from the ultra-perfection of Evangelista's embodiment of the supermodel ethos to the piercing and plaid of Kristen McMenamy's defiant fog-bound grunge - he never really removed himself from the picture. The listlessness and dejection of the grunge shoot became like Warhol's riots, crashes and executions, merely the symbol of another era's fall from grace.

Even with the notorious Calvin ads - part Warhol (My Hustler, Lonesome Cowboys and Chelsea Girls), part Larry Clark's book, 1992 - realism was conveyed as much by the format and presentation of the photographs as it was by the peek of schoolgirl panty or fat-pack crotch. The tongue-in-chic faux woodgrain, like the synthetic shag, perfectly complimented the 8 x 10 rent-boy aesthetic, the impress of the industrial cleaner still scored into the wall-to-wall carpeting like the memory of nylon burns to hands and knees. But for all the abstract specificity of the settings, Meisel's series tended to read less as hardcore digression than as a continued eulogy to a soft-hustle body whose disruptions of gender are captive to the strange space between style and desire.

Such continual reinvention may be the paradoxical constant of any protean form, to which fashion photography is no exception. Always to some extent the sum of their parts, Meisel's works strangely lack the signature resulting from collaboration with a stylist that marks the work of Bruce Weber and Joe McKenna, Juergen Teller and Venetia Scott or David Sims and Melanie Ward. In part, this may be attributable to Meisel's portrayal of fashion as interior monologue - a non-stop conversation about the efficacy and worth of abstracts such as taste, glamour and style. His works pose as expansively referential and open-ended but in fact are often solipsistic, closing in on the subject as both figure and figment of a constructed imagination. His choices of setting reflect this: the stark concrete functionalism of the Brill House (CK Fall 98), like the volcanic ash of the Dolce & Gabbana ads (Spring 98) and the bare stage on which angels with dirty faces act out the 'Theatre of Fashion' (Italian Vogue, October 98), offer no reassurances to the contrary.

Some months after the 'Untitled' story for Italian Vogue, Meisel once again shifted the goalposts with a shoot that drew its inspiration from the paintings of Alex Katz. It was a startling and beautiful series, the sort of celebration of the theatre of manners that only Meisel could achieve - note-perfect in casting, styling, hair, make-up and exquisitely tuned to the nuances of colour, temperature and composition. Lawn Party, the centre spread, is a frozen tableaux morte, a Madame Tussaud's of recognisable faces blown over by an ice storm, solidifying fluid anxiety into isolated disconnection. Beneath the shiny glaze of luxury, the wasteland. Galliano's couture doesn't speak, it merely drapes, in its own bejewelled language of gravity. Its exclusivity suggests our exclusion - an exclusion reiterated by the faceless uniforms who attend the scene like a cordon of cocktail-bearing sentinels from some West Point military academy. And all the while, the same sublimation of light into high style, the same lofty casualness of Katz' paintings, invites us in as it asks us to move on.

Meisel drains atmosphere and animus from the picture to create trophy women, taxidermied on the spot by his meticulous gaze. Conversation has stopped and the words have fallen to the floor. Amber, Georgina and Kate hold lit cigarettes from which no smoke uncurls. They advertise a kind of disaffected nonchalance that brooks no questions. The photo captures the stilled moment when the model vacates the picture to leave the studio, when, as Raoul Vaneigem's classic Situationist text has it, 'The audience gets up to leave their seats. Time to collect their coats and go home. They turn around. No more coats. No more home'. The house of fashion turns out to be a prop rather than a home - one that can be dismantled at whim and fast-tracked into the next picture, the next season, the next next.

Meisel's interpretation of Katz' ordinary white people, images of fresh-faced alienation, brings to the table an even whiter, more rarefied iconography that takes Katz' Norman Rockwellesque modishness and transposes the nothing-much-happens-here of small-town America into the more contemporary anomie of consumer burn-out. Included in the story are a series of exquisite frontal portraits that belong somewhere between the cool-lite of Katz' paintings, Thomas Ruff's passport-style physiognomic landscapes and the darkened tonal palette of Warhol's portraits of Jed Johnson from the mid-70s. They are images from which all messages of communication have been expunged. Maggie wears only Clinique; Oliver, Dolce & Gabbana; Carla, Missoni. Their faces remain as inscrutable as the captions. The elements never quite add up. Positioned at one remove from the encoded identifications of persona, lifestyle and so on, Meisel's subjects seem to be distanced from the things they purportedly represent. Our gaze is met. Theirs is opaque and grave with the responsibility of discomfort - echoes of Thomas Pynchon's end-of-the-world book, The Crying of Lot 49 (1966) - sending little secret messages to one's little secret self.

Like any dynamic system, fashion is irrigated by change. A few seasons back, the designer Narciso Rodriguez captured this when he described the woman of his collection as 'built for speed'. By this he meant not only that she was transzonal, steeped in what Don DeLillo would term 'the Esperanto of jet lag', but also that she accepted the unbearable contingency of fashionable being. Within the temporal scale of this world, the present exists only in elapsed time, as the lead time to what has already been. And the past, in order to keep up with itself, must be remembered to be forgotten. Rodriguez' woman is in this way like Meisel's photography - never more than a construct caught in the moment of becoming - a Promethean product of the interface of speed and disappearance. This is a form of self-conscious amnesia to which the half-life of the magazine is particularly well suited. To turn the page, the story, the month, the season, is to partake in the ecstasy of supercession. Fantasies and realisms may come and go, talking of Katz or Odd Nerdrum. (The peculiar Norwegian painter's work was the inspiration behind Meisel's darkly Arthurian Versace campaign for Fall/Winter 98/99.) But the speed of this conversation kills meaning by eradicating context, situating every image with its portent of lifestyle and sexuality within the indispensable moment.

Meisel may well be the consummate fashion photographer precisely because his work refuses to make apologies for this. His images of women do not aim for the permanence of the art to which they allude. Some meet the camera from beneath this fringe. Others, as in 'Cross-View' (Italian Vogue, Nov 1998), perform a cross-hatching of bodies as if in response to the instructions of an Yvonne Rainer performance piece. Others still confront the camera so directly as to seem startled into a fleeting madness - like the knowing inhabitants of a world in which the conditions of their impermanence, the ability to seduce, beguile, conspire and deceive, have created the terms of a certain type of survival.

Take away the surroundings and depose the models from their mission as agents of fashion and the photographs are still better than virtually any around. At a time when every fashion photographer is making claims to posterity, Meisel remains uniquely true to fashion's pace, refusing to slow his images down to the speed of art. Books may make claim to fashion's history, but it is in the adulterous, disposable purity of the magazine that it is being made. Meisel dignifies what fashion is by never relying on the permission of what it is not. His is a sensibility that isn't out to sell garments, accessories, make-up or fragrance, although it does all of these things to great effect. It is out to sell itself, to celebrate its own momentum - which is pretty much what fashion photography is all about.