Alexei Hay Fashion

FOREVER TORN BETWEEN ITS AMBITIONS as art and its allegiance to commerce, fashion photography is so confident right now that for all intents the distinction has dissolved. Serious fashion types call the genre's most accomplished image makers "auteurs," and the conceit seems more apt than ever. If the fashion photograph has traditionally been calculated to seduce, to startle, and, of course, to sell, today it often simply sells itself. Forget the clothes; forget the model; vision is all. Take twenty-seven-year-old Alexei Hay: Lifted out of the editorial context, his pictures rarely betray their function. "I never think about the clothes when I go to a shoot," he says, and the fashion usually does seem incidental, if not entirely beside the point.

In fact, Hay would probably object to being described as a fashion photographer. He works regularly at Harper's Bazaar, where he must think clothes, and recently signed on to shoot Gucci's new ad campaign (he says the prominent bulge in one model's pants was not his idea), but he seems more excited about blowing up TV sets and cereal boxes for the New York Times Magazine than trekking to the California desert with an entourage of makeup artists, hairdressers, and models in fur. Though Hay talks about adapting Irving Penn's portable tent for his Gucci shoot--removing the back wall for an oddly unnaturalistic effect--the sources that feed his head are an unlikely mix, from James Nachtwey and vintage Face spreads to Helmut Newton and forgotten '70s cheese whiz Cheyco Leidmann. Maybe that's why the best of his work, though extremely polished, still feels real: frisky, funny