Mario Testino: Amsterdam

Earlier this year, over several days of intense activity, Mario Testino went to Amsterdam and returned having made twelve photographs. From time to time in a photographer's work time, place and subject, core ideas, instincts and influences come together to produce a definitive statement; which happened on this occasion. Amsterdam is a symbol for Testino as much as a place and spells freedom - the freedom to be, to love, to live as a complete individual. Assembling his cast from the streets of the city, Testino made tableaux viants, brightly coloured and swarming with life, which take us on a journey through a modern garden of earthly delights. Complete with surreal presences, grotesques, beauties, sexual disorientations, unconscious quotations of Bosch and Breughel yet untouched by the easy surrealism of computer manipulation, the photographs have a bold sense of design and pattern. Everything is in its ordained place, order has prevailed over life's confusions but light is used to heighten the reality as numerous individual sources play over the subjects. Testino continues to prove himself one of the outstanding image-makers of the moment, celebrating the valuable freedoms of arts and life in an Amsterdam of the mind. Patrick Kinmonth



Mario would like to take this opportunity to thank everyone involved in
the production of these images including the following:

Paul Berends; Witman Kleipool, Amsterdam; Charlotte Stockdale, Gawain Rainey.
Alexander van Slobbe, Theo Botschuyver, Klaar van der Lippe, Heleen Klopper & Joep van Lieshout; Thomas Nutzl, Pietro Birendelli & Giovanni Zacagninni. Event Architecture by Herman Verkerk & Rens Bouma (ImaginAir). Stedelijk Museum, Amsterdam; Centraal
Museum, Utrecht. Picto (Paris).


Exhibition held in association with Conde Nast and L’Uomo Vogue.