John Rawlings

People Culture






All images © John Rawlings/Condé Naste

Photographer John Rawlings was one of a pod of key creative photographers employed by publishing house Condé Naste in the fifties.

Along with luminaries like Irving Penn, to create in the pages of Vogue and other titles the chrome clad version of the American dream.

In a way these images are the photographic equivalent of the artwork of Art Fitzpatrick, who we have interviewed here.

In Rawlings work the link between the design of the behemoth cruisers and the broader world of fashion reaches its ultimate expression.

You can feel the affluence of a very specific time and a place in these images, and the idealised version of American womanhood (as possession as much as the car) that they represented.

Amazing too when you consider how beauty and fashion is still used to sell the dream of an automobile – albeit in a huge variety of ways – fifty years on.

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