David Seidner

David Seidner (born 18 February 1957) was an American photographer known for his portraits and fashion photography. He died of complications from AIDS on Sunday, June 6, 1999.

David Seidner was nineteen when his first cover picture was published and twenty-one when the first of many solo exhibitions of his photographs was shown in Paris. Over the following 20 years he created both "commercial" and "artistic" work. In the 1980s he was under a contract with Yves Saint Laurent. His commercial work included fashion shoots for the French and Italian editions of Vogue, Harper's Bazaar, Vanity Fair and The New York Times Magazine, and advertising campaigns for Emmanuel Ungaro, Lanvin, Christian Dior, John Galliano and Bill Blass. The artistic side encompassed shows at the Pompidou Centre and La Maison Europeenne de la Photographie in Paris, the Whitney Museum in New York, and the publication of several books. In 1986 he was commissioned by the Musée des Arts de la Mode in Paris to photograph costumes from its collection. His signature imagery from that period included photographic fragments, paint, shards of glass and reflections. His influence then was the music of John Cage.

His immense cultural knowledge enabled him to draw on the past to create modern yet timeless images. His nudes evoke Greek classical sculpture; his portraits from the mid-Nineties were inspired by John Singer Sargent and evoke the paintings of Boldini, Ingres and Velázquez; his black and white portraits of artists recall busts of Roman emperors.

Seidner's work had several defining periods. In its evolution, his images became more and more pure, ending with the simplicity of the orchid series, which was taken in his Miami apartment using an auto- focus camera and colour negative film.

A very important phase of David Seidner's work was his series of nudes, which were also collected in book form as Nudes, to accompany an exhibition at New York's Robert Miller Gallery in 1995. Accomplished in a relatively short period of two years, the photographs were inspired by his love of Greek antiquity and a search for beauty. Friends, acquaintances and friends of friends posed in classical, sculptural stances.

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