Perfect Accidents
I've been building some mood board collections lately, and one of the images I placed in a recent set was so beautifully composed & evocative, that I just couldn't stop returning to it. A bit of browsing turned up countless homage style replicas of the same composition made by other photographers. That added to my curiosity about it and was enough to send me on a quest to find the origin of the initial image.
The photographer is a woman named Sheila Metzner. In the end, the image has a surprisingly accidental origin that fits its stunning appearance. The photograph was made for a Fendi fragrance campaign in the 1980s. There is something so poetic about it too. Even though it was created for an ad, it easily reads as a fine art piece on its own. The inspiration behind it was a well known myth. Ovid's Pygmalion, the story of a Cypriot sculptor who carved a likeness of his ideal woman, then fell in love with it & wished it alive. Aphrodite took pity on him and granted his wish, bringing the statue to life for him. Pygmalion discovered the transformation the moment he kissed it.
Metzner received the concept for the campaign and was sent sketches of two full-length figures rendered as sculpture, drawing directly from the Pygmalion myth. Karl Lagerfeld sent his own mood boards, built around Mannerist painting, titled "The Passion of Rome” and the “Colors of Rome." The shoot was planned for the gardens of a museum in Rome. When Metzner and her crew arrived, the guard turned them away, insisting the garden counted as an "interior" space and that their permit only covered the parking area outside the gate. The team regrouped at the home of Alda Fendi to work out a new plan.
That change of plans is where the accident became destiny. In the entrance vestibule, on a table, sat an extraordinary ancient Roman marble bust. The model, Marie Sophie, walked up to it and gently kissed the figure on its cheek. Metzner captured the moment as it happened, then called hair, makeup, and wardrobe back in to formalize it. The result became "The Passion of Rome" for Fendi.
What moves me most isn't just the myth, or the image, but the way the photograph, like the statue in the story, seems to have found a greater purpose beyond what it was made for. This is something that happens often with art. The artist begins with an idea and chance supplies the thing that makes the idea something extraordinary. Metzner didn't stage the kiss, she simply acted as a medium for the muses, helping set the stage for it to appear.
The image, like Pygmalion's sculpture, has lived two lives. It began as a commercial fashion advertisement. Over time it became recognized as an important part of Metzner's artistic body of work, now exhibited, collected, and discussed as fine art photography, often with no mention of its commercial origins at all.
Its simple construction and its honeyed, Fresson tone give it a dreamlike resonance that matches its meaning and reveals something true about what beauty does for us in art. The same thing Aphrodite did for Pygmalion. It gives life to the art for us to love.
Blog originally posted, HERE.
This really resonated with me. It was something that was drilled into us at SCAD.
I’ve come to think that whatever we make—whether it’s photography, painting, printmaking, sculpture, drawing or video—doesn’t ultimately belong only to us. We protect our intellectual property, of course, but once a work enters the world it begins to live a life of its own.
A photograph can have many lives and many chapters beyond its first purpose or our first connection to it. Sometimes those later lives become just as meaningful as the moment it was made. ✨
Love this. As in life, when you set out with a plan, it falls apart and you end up somewhere you'd never have chosen that turns out better than what you intended. That it holds true even within art makes it feel that much more special.