"Allure is a word very few people use nowadays, but it is something that exists. Allure holds you. Whether it is a gaze or a glance in the street or a face in the crowd or someone sitting opposite you at lunch ... you are held."
Diana Vreeland, Fashion Editor
It shimmers quietly and timelessly from among all the rapidly changing fashions, trends and opinions. It appears only briefly in a fleeting combination of elegance, grace and movement. Stance, attitude or allure is intangible, indescribable inconceivable and unattainable in the perpetual white noise of our zeitgeist. Yet it is the essence that radiates from deep within. It oscillates between coolness and naturalness, with a fascinating mixture of staging and authenticity. However, the more it becomes a theme in itself, shifting into focus, the more it dissipates. Should one wish to grasp it, or seek an explanation, it dissolves. Yet how can the fragile, immaterial character of allure be held photographically? Photographers constantly take on this challenge anew—with the goal of capturing this ephemeral phenomenon, sometimes spontaneously, at other times as a visual composition.
Whether fashion photography, street photography, reportage or conceptual approaches—the respective working context of the individual photos in not significant in this compilation of the Susanne von Meiss Collection. Instead, all the photographs share the absence of the direct gaze of the person portraited into the camera and the subtle play with the hidden and the mysterious—that goes beyond sex or gender. Hence the main focus lies on detail views of individual parts of the body and accessories, as well as on silhouettes, movement or concealment. The individual photographs do not tell any explicit stories. They do not contain any direct narrative. They serve as diverse projection films for the viewers and their interpretation.
The Susanne von Meiss Collection representatively covers all genres and styles in the history of photography—from the 1920s through to the present. It includes works by internationally renowned photographers, however for the main part it does not give preference to the iconic photographs but rather to unknown classics. The personal selection ranges from Diane Arbus, Richard Avedon, Rene Burri and Henri Cartier-Bresson through Horst P. Horst, Irving Penn, Paolo Roversi and August Sander to contemporary artists such as Tracey Emin, Nan Goldin, Daido Moriyama, Richard Prince and Juergen Teller.
The exhibition was curated by Felix Hoffmann and Birgit Filzmaier