Nevada-born photographer Just Loomis (born 1957) began his career in 1983 in Milan, when editor and gallerist Carla Sozzani gave him his first fashion story for Vogue Sposa. It was during his time in Italy that Loomis discovered the world of the “backstage.” “I was in Rome photographing the Valentino show. I wandered backstage … no one went backstage then. It was like discovering a world of secret beauty.” This book, the result of years of work in Paris, Milan, New York and Los Angeles, is his portrait of this hidden world. “I wanted to to capture the models working, not posing,” he writes; “they were so beautiful in motion.”
After working in Italy Loomis moved to New York and became a regular contributor to Harper’s Bazaar and New York Times magazine. In 1998 he decided to pursue documentary portraiture. This resulted in the 2010 Hatje Cantz book As We Are, edited by June Newton (in part as an acknowledgment of the years Loomis spent assisting her husband Helmut Newton). Loomis returned to the backstage in 2000, bringing his love of the documentary portrait to the world of fashion.
Published by Hatje Cantz. Edited by June Newton. Text by Matthias Harder.
Just Loomis' first photographs were made in the mid-1970s, recording the railway lines and the casinos of his birthplace in Reno, Nevada; they tell of the highs and lows of everyday life in the American West. A former assistant and friend of Helmut Newton's, Loomis (born 1957) worked in the 1980s as a fashion photographer for magazines such as Harper's Bazaar and The New York Times Magazine. Turning to portraiture and documentary photography in 1990, Loomis began to make portrait photographs, in both black and white and in color, that show a raw and affectionate view of everyday life in America: a waitress behind a counter in a Hollywood diner, a young couple exuding the bliss of early romance, or children caught in moments of play. From his earliest work through to this latest collection, the photographer's first monograph, Loomis' method has been to insist on the value and beauty of what lies immediately to hand, and to locate the moments that illuminate that fact for the viewer. As June Newton states, "He understands these people, as he comes from the same place. These pictures are without artifice of any kind... I call them a perfect example of Americana today."
Just Loomis: As We Are