Every decade has its own visual language, but few, like the 1990s, marked such a decisive break with what came before. After the sculptural opulence and theatrical staging of the 1980s, fashion turned toward a more relaxed realism — a quest for authenticity where clothing finally seemed to fade into the background, allowing the wearer to take center stage. In this pivotal decade, Pamela Hanson was not just a witness, but one of its most subtle visual architects. The exhibition dedicated to her at the Staley-Wise Gallery, In the 90s, is not a simple retrospective; it is an immersion into the intimacy of a decade that, in the artist’s words, “changed everything.”
Pamela Hanson’s gaze is above all a matter of complicity. Unlike the dominant, often masculine aesthetic of the time, which placed models on a distant pedestal, Hanson built her work on closeness. Arriving in Paris in the 1980s, she shared the daily lives of models — their apartments, their doubts, their ambitions. This immersion allowed her to develop a photographic language rooted in exchange rather than pose. Her images do not capture models; they portray young women living: a burst of laughter, a cigarette held with studied nonchalance, a moment of daydreaming before a mirror. She was one of the few women to break through in this milieu at the time — and you can feel it. Her lens does not objectify; it engages in dialogue.
What strikes the viewer in this selection of images, some never before shown or published, is their narrative strength. Each photograph is a short film in itself. We see Trish Goff in an evening gown ordering from a hot-dog stand in Los Angeles — a visual shock between ultra-glamour and everyday triviality. A young Kate Moss, mischievous, peers out at us from behind a curtain. These “joyful snapshots” are not lucky accidents, but the product of a method: creating an environment of trust where spontaneity can emerge. While assisting Arthur Elgort, Hanson refined this ability to capture movement and immediacy.
Her work with the supermodels is particularly revealing. At the very moment when Christy Turlington, Linda Evangelista, and Kate Moss were becoming near-divine icons, Hanson photographed them with disarming simplicity. She wasn’t chasing the flawless perfection of glossy magazine covers, but the crack, the personality, the humanity behind the myth. Her portraits are silent conversations, suspended truths in which clothing becomes nothing more than an attribute of character. Even her campaigns for giants like Ralph Lauren or Estée Lauder carry the same imprint: a living, embodied elegance, never frozen.
As contemporary fashion indulges in a relentless nostalgia for the 1990s, this exhibition reminds us that the style of the era was less about clothes than about attitude. It was the age of effortless chic, of a free spirit that resonates with particular clarity today, in a time saturated with algorithmic, hyper-polished images. Pamela Hanson’s work — one piece of which is part of the permanent collection at the Smithsonian American Art Museum — stands as an antidote. It speaks of friendship, joy, and a certain carefree lightness that seems to have vanished from our time.
Accompanied by the release of a monograph published by Rizzoli, this exhibition is not merely a look in the rear-view mirror, but an affirmation of the enduring relevance of intimate photography. A photography that does not dictate, but shares.
