Scott Schuman – better known as The Sartorialist – has emerged over the last few years as the leading photographer of the internet. Since September 2005, on his website thesartorialist.com he has recorded not so much “street fashion” but the moment when men and women with a certain style find themselves in particular time and place and light and capture his attention. The response has been a phenomenon. The site now regularly gets 1.8 million unique visits a month and 12 million page views.
In many ways Schuman can be seen as the first “true” photographer of the digital age. His pictures are shot digitally, disseminated digitally, commented on digitally, and printed digitally. Keenly sought to lecture, shoot, exhibit, and attend the front row of fashion shows around the world, none of this would have happened before the internet.
Schuman’s first book of photographs, “The Sartorialist”, sold over 100,000 copies, topped illustrated book best seller lists, and was translated into several languages. To celebrate the September publication of Schuman’s second Penguin book, “The Sartorialist – Closer”, Danziger Gallery will be mounting a two week exhibition concurrent with New York’s Fashion Week.
While he began as a self-taught photographer, The Sartorialist’s images have become increasingly accomplished works of art distinguished by Schuman’s particular feeling for the elegant moment, his way of relating subject and background, and his ability to put his subjects at ease so that he can create a work of resonance in the very short amount of time he is usually afforded.
As a body of work, his photographs describe how fashion manifests itself in real life as opposed to the runway – inclusive of all ethnicities, economic classes, age, and sex. As Schuman travels take him further around the world his blog has become a showcase for the varied sartorial tastes of real people across the globe.
Scott Schuman was born in Indianapolis, Indiana in 1967. He majored in costume construction at Indiana eventually opening his own showroom for emerging designers. After 15 years in the fashion business, he started The Sartorialist to, in his own words, “simply share photos of people that I saw on the streets of New York that I thought looked great. When I worked in the fashion industry, I always felt that there was a disconnect between what I was selling in the showroom and what I was seeing real people (really cool people) wearing in real life.” He began The Sartorialist with the idea of creating a two-way dialogue about the world of fashion and its relationship to daily life.
Schuman’s photographs now reside in the permanent collections of the Victoria & Albert Museum and the Tokyo Metropolitan Museum of Photography. In 2011 he was listed as one of TIME Magazine’s top 100 design influencers. In June, 2012, Schuman received the CFDA (Council of Fashion Designers of America) Media Award – one of the most prestigious awards in fashion.
This exhibition is sponsored by COACH.
