Alexi Lubomirski

England-born, New York–based photographer Alexi Lubomirski has become an established name within the fashion industry, shooting for such publications as Harper’s Bazaar, Vogue and GQ, and working with cover stars such as Charlize Theron, Gwyneth Paltrow, Natalie Portman, Jennifer Lopez and Nicole Kidman, to name but a few. It was after shooting Lupita Nyong’o, however, that Lubomirski was struck by the homogeneity of the subjects he’d been hired to shoot professionally. Often when he submitted a list of models he was interested in shooting, responses would range along the lines of “we love her, but...,” “her hair is a problem,” “she is too dark” or “she is too light to make a statement.”

In Diverse Beauty, Lubomirski aims to move beyond the underrepresentation of women from a range of ethnicities in fashion media. The volume compiles his photographs of beautiful women of every color, size, age and sexual orientation in a celebration of beauty that adds dimension to the standards so omniscient in Western fashion magazines and advertisements.

This handsome volume of cinematic fashion portraiture--featuring such subjects as Lupita Nyong’o, Rashida Jones, Salma Hayek, Demi Lovato, Anja Rubik, Jennifer Lopez, Chanel Iman, Hari Nef, Isabella Rossellini, Tyra Banks and Rosie Huntington-Whiteley, among many others--is also a small step in the direction of changing societal norms.

Over the last ten years, Alexi Lubomirski has become an established name within the fashion industry, shooting for such publications as Harper’s Bazaar, Vogue and GQ. Decade is a collection of Lubomirski’s fashion and portrait work from 2003–2013. Containing studio photography and narrative fashion spreads in exotic locations, this book also features portraits of actors and celebrities such as Cate Blanchett, Victoria Beckham, Heidi Klum, Kirsten Dunst, Charlize Theron, Kate Winslet, Scarlett Johansson and Ewan McGregor against a broad array of backdrops. Throughout Decade, Lubomirski uses similarities in narrative, form and subject matter to tell a visual story and create a dialogue between contrasting images. In this way, Lubomirski’s photographs feel more like film stills, capturing his subjects in moments of "visual transit"--walking down a street, emerging from a pool--that allude to a world beyond the frame of the image. In these cinematic photographs, Lubomirski creates a space in which "the viewer is left free to invent their own narrative from what they perceive from the image."
Alexi Lubomirski (born 1975) received his first camera at the age of 11 and began working with narrative-based fashion photography while he was studying at the University of Brighton in the UK. After finishing his studies, he was introduced to Mario Testino, who soon hired Lubomirski as an assistant. Toward the end of his four years with Testino, Katie Grand chose him to start shooting for the iconic Face magazine and subsequently Harper’s Bazaar US. In 2008, Lubomirski had his first exhibition, Transit, a mixed-media commentary on TV culture, comprised of preconceived film stills, at MILK gallery in New York. He is currently based in New York.