CATHLEEN NAUNDORF
Un Rêve de Mode
2 March – 31 March 2012

Hamiltons Gallery marks another first in its exhibition programme with new works by photographer Cathleen Naundorf. Over the past six years, Cathleen Naundorf has worked on her haute couture series “Un Rêve de Mode”, concentrating on six couture houses: Chanel, Dior, Gaultier, Lacroix, Elie Saab and Valentino. Due to her outstanding results, Cathleen was offered the opportunity to choose gowns from the couturiers’ archives for her elaborate, cinematic productions.

Her approach is meticulous - she conducts intensive research, creating enchanting handmade journals in order to develop a storyboard: archive photos of couturiers, texts and interviews written by Naundorf and others, as well as sketches of planned photo compositions. She chooses her own models, locations, and hair and make-up designers – all these details are essential to her personal pursuit of transcendent beauty. Cathleen passionately uses large format cameras for her work: The expensive Polaroid films, many of which are out of production, help create the beautiful images that become an homage to classical haute couture. A book about Cathleen’s haute couture series is scheduled for publication by Prestel this Spring.

Cathleen Naundorf was born in 1968 in Weißenfels an der Saale, Germany. In the late 1980s she graduated from photography studies in Munich. She worked as a photo assistant in New York, Singapore and Paris in the following years, before she started travelling in 1993 to such destinations as Mongolia, Siberia, Gobi Desert and the Amazonas headwaters in Brazil. The results of these insightful pictures have been included in eight publications of renowned publishing houses. In 1997, she started photographing for the Süddeutsche Zeitung with a fashion page of her own, as well as for Glamour and Vogue, for which she was commissioned to take pictures backstage at the Paris fashion shows. She lives and works in Paris.