Brigitte Niedermair

Me and Fashion is a constellation of fashion photographs made by Brigitte Niedermair (born 1971) over the past 20 years. These images show how, informed by her parallel creative path as an independent art photographer, she continues to query and utilize her female perspective to expand the conventions and biases of the fashion image system.

Niedermair’s photographic collaborators and subjects tend to have training as dancers and can transform themselves into the material expression of the body as a language, adopting an “attitude of resistance” toward the camera. Me and Fashion is published for Niedermair’s exhibition at the Museo di Palazzo Mocenigo during the 2019 Venice Biennale. Working with acclaimed photography curator Charlotte Cotton, Niedermair responds to the atmosphere of each room of the Palazzo Mocenigo, replacing historic paintings with her fashion and still-life photographs to both amplify and counter the embedded subtexts of gender and identity that permeate these predominantly 17th-century interiors.