Sunnei SS21

That relationship between the designer and the camera is at the center of YSL and Photography, the International Center of Photography’s newest exhibition, on view until September 28. Featuring more than 300 archival objects—including photographs, magazine spreads, advertising materials, and Saint Laurent’s own illustrations—the exhibition explores photography’s role in constructing Saint Laurent’s public identity, preserving his work, and cementing his place in fashion history.

The exhibition begins with a chronological survey of finished photographs by some of the twentieth century’s most influential image-makers, including Richard Avedon, Irving Penn, William Klein, Helmut Newton, Annie Leibovitz, Steven Meisel, and Jürgen Teller. From Penn’s elegant 1957 portrait of the young Saint Laurent at Dior to Newton’s cinematic Rue Aubriot photographs, Guy Bourdin’s theatrical Opéra–Ballets Russes imagery, and Teller’s monumental late-career portrait, the galleries trace nearly five decades of the designer’s evolution.

“He’s probably the most photographed fashion designer of his generation,” says Simon Baker, guest curator of the exhibition. Saint Laurent’s collaborations with photographers became central to the visual identity of his house. Helmut Newton, one of his closest creative collaborators, described the designer as a major inspiration in a book celebrating Saint Laurent’s 40th anniversary in fashion. “Yves Saint Laurent has inspired my best fashion photos,” Newton wrote, citing the famous “smoking” photographs on Rue Aubriot, his images of couples in tailored suits kissing, and the striking portraits he created around Saint Laurent’s collections. “There are so few people with whom I feel completely in accord,” Newton wrote. “And he is so touching, so fragile.”

One of Baker’s favorite images in the exhibition comes from the very beginning of that story: a 1962 silver gelatin print by Pierre Boulat showing a twenty-five-year-old Saint Laurent peering through a narrow gap in a wall as models walked his second runway show under his newly founded label. Published in LIFE magazine that April, the image offered an unusually intimate glimpse into the fledgling couturier’s career. “Pierre Boulat shot hundreds of photographs of Yves Saint Laurent throughout his career,” Baker says. “But this is my favorite. It’s so touching to see this totally unobserved moment of Saint Laurent, who was so young and so shy, watching his career unfold before his own eyes.”

The second half of the exhibition shifts from finished photographs to the creative process behind them, drawing from the archives of the Musée Yves Saint Laurent Paris. Visitors encounter contact sheets, photographers’ correspondence, campaign materials, magazines, press clippings, personal photographs, and behind-the-scenes documentation that reveal how fashion images were created.  One of his favorite discoveries while curating the exhibit was the magazines themselves. He found himself unexpectedly captivated by the extraordinary sophistication of fashion publishing throughout the 1960s and 1970s, fascinated by the editorial layouts, typography, printing techniques, and graphic design that transformed fashion photographs. One spread particularly fascinated Baker: a largely black-and-white layout of the Mondrian dress in Vogue in 1965, in which the dress's signature blocks of primary color were selectively printed onto the page, allowing the magazine itself to become an extension of Saint Laurent's design. "It's an incredible piece of art direction and design," he says.

Among Baker’s biggest surprises were Saint Laurent’s own graphite sketches based directly on published photographs and magazine covers. Rather than preparatory drawings to plan shoots, many appear to have been made after the photographs were already in circulation, suggesting that Saint Laurent repeatedly revisited magazine images that lingered in his imagination. “It was like the photography was always there in the back of his mind,” Baker says.