Girls On Film

“Deep down I feel I have a desire to control things,” muses Miles Aldridge about his evolution from self-taught “grunge” snapper to frequent Vogue Italia contributor and ultra-glossy conceptual artist. The photographer is candid regarding his passion for cinema, and cites movies with dramatic female roles, such as Isabella Rossellini’s Dorothy Vallens in Blue Velvet, as being particularly influential. Accordingly, in a quasi-directorial style Aldridge sketches one-frame storyboards of his ideas before entering the studio, where he produces all of his archly staged color-saturated images. A new exhibition of his drawings and photographs in Florence presents these cinematic photographs as part of a grander vision. “These pictures are all independent projects [but] because they’re all from one mind there’s a sense of them being stills from the same movie,” he says. Other influences are more personal: Aldridge is the son of legendary art director Alan Aldridge, who created seminal album covers for The Beatles and The Who among others, but it's his mother’s influence—post-divorce—that comes though heavily in his tension-filled photographs of women. “These women are more complicated than being purely beautiful in that they have this deep, dramatic life,” he says. “The family that I grew up in was filled with these kind of dramas.” Miles Aldridge runs through September 1 at Brancolini Grimaldi and Gallery Hotel Art in Florence.