DAVID SEIDNER (1957 - 1999)
David Seidner was born in Los Angeles. At seventeen he moved to Paris to work as a fashion photographer and by nineteen, his pictures were appearing on magazine covers. Seidner had his first solo exhibition in 1978. Based in Paris for most of his career, Seidner had a two-year exclusive contract with Yves Saint Laurent. His images, which appeared in Harper's Bazaar, Harper's & Queen, The New York Times Magazine, Vanity Fair, and international editions of VOGUE in the 1980's and 90's, greatly influenced fashion photography for over a decade.
In addition to his advertising and editorial fashion work, Seidner also pursued other projects dealing with clothing, the body, and art. He photographed the miniature war-time couture replicas housed at the Musée des Arts de la Mode in Paris as well as the Academy Award-winning costumes Eiko Ishioka designed for the film version of "Bram Stoker's Dracula". In his final series of highly saturated color images of orchids from 1999, Seidner seemed to be moving away from portraiture and instead reinvestigating the abstract compositions of his early fashion photographs.
Seidner died of AIDS-related illnesses in 1999. In 2024, The International Center of Photography (ICP) in New York opened “David Seidner: Fragments, 1977-99”, a survey exhibition drawn from Seidner's archive, which has been a part of ICP’s collection since 2001.