Even saying Craig McDean’s name aloud has the strange effect of making me feel intimidated. It’s always been this way. Maybe if I whisper it… but no, what am I saying, that seems more ridiculous than my inclination already is.
It’s an understatement to say that McDean figures highly in the pantheon of my aesthetic influences; his photographs were among the earliest that made me think fashion image-making might be the right place for me. I’ll hazard the assumption that his photographs—whether those i-D Magazine cover stories or the iconic 90s Jil Sander ads—had the same impact on most of my former colleagues, at least the ones around my age. Being an adolescent, by which I mean being impressionable, is a powerful, even enviable mental state to possess when it comes to absorbing art. I don't even work in fashion anymore, and I still feel a visual echo in my work today as a writer when I think of his fashion photography. I should actually just say “photography,” and not specify the genre, because sometimes I wonder whether people take pictures less seriously if they’re designated as commercial images, which fashion pictures generally are. And honestly, I wonder if such prejudice is in fact, sometimes, warranted. Though in McDean’s case it is not. Something I find really miraculous and fascinating about his book I Love Fast Cars is that even though most of the shots are of cars shrouded in clouds of exhaust, they still somehow look exactly like his Jil Sander ads (or i-D covers, etc.). You could slap a fashion brand logo on one of those shots and it would probably be pretty convincing. It’s either because the pictures are really beautiful, or it’s because his vision as a photographer is so strong that his work really does transcend genre, categorization. This book, I think, is a testament to that possibility. Actually not “possibility” —- I’m going to go with the word “fact.”
-Eugenie Dalland