Last night, I Only Want You to Love Me, a retrospective of celebrated photographer Miles Aldridge’s work, opened at London’s Somerset House. Coinciding with the release of his Rizzoli book, which bears the same title, the show highlights Aldridge’s ability to capture the fragility of the human condition via fashion. Colorful yet darkly disturbing, Aldridge’s photographs, of course, feature gorgeous women, but always with something amiss. “My work is often about a woman with a perfect face of beauty yet riddled with anxiety,” Aldridge told Style.com. “They are contemplating the moral and ethical complexities of life, but whilst immersed in the ordinary. A mind doesn’t stop thinking because of the banal minutiae of everyday life.” On display are several such femmes: one is collapsed on the floor, having dropped a tray of food; another is leaning over the gas stove, lighting a cigarette, perilously close to catching aflame; another appears to be in a deep trance while blow-drying her hair. Aldridge, who also celebrated the launch of Short Breaths, an exhibition at London’s Brancolini Grimaldi gallery, this week, added, “Clothes and all the stuff that comes with fashion is just one part of a woman’s life, not the sum of it. I hope that my pictures represent that.”
I Only Want You to Love Me is on view at London’s Somerset House through September 29.
—Afsun Qureshi
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