Hamiltons’ highlights at Paris Photo 2017 included a selection of Irving Penn’s Small Trades, a series he photographed when he was thirty-three years old. Penn created masterful representations of skilled trades people dressed in work clothes, with markers of their occupation. A neutral backdrop, often an old theatre curtain, and natural light set the stage on which his subjects present themselves – an atmospheric ‘visual nowhere’ that Penn was instrumental in popularising as a staple of fashion photography.
Hamiltons also showed ‘Lost in L.A.’, the most recent series from Christopher Thomas, transporting the viewer to a silent city, devoid of human presence and cars. A final highlight was Guido Mocafico’s ‘Brendel’, photographs of botanical models created by Robert and Reinhold Brendel in the late 19th and early 20th centuries.
