![]() "I said what photographers I liked, Paddle8 went to them, asked if they had any nudes they'd like to sell." She makes the process sound a little more casual than Gilkes does. She approached "No Clothes" in the same way. "I have a lot of photographs by people I've worked with." That means quite a gamut, from Arthur Elgort to Steven Klein. "It's an extension of the picture," says Coddington. Her friendship with Weber also set the tone for her collection-she likes having a personal relationship with the photographers whose work she collects. "Bruce was always nosing around and finding interesting photographers, not the Avedons and the Westons necessarily but names that you didn't know." Bert Hardy? Raymond Voinquel? There are volumes of their work among the hundreds of photography monographs in Coddington and Malige's bookcases. His whole lifestyle infected me." One means of transmission was the pictures Weber gave to Coddington. Photographs became something I no longer just did for work. But when I met Bruce, I got totally hooked by him. When they sold it, they just threw everything out, and you'd go and find these incredible prints in the garbage. "Years ago at Condé Nast in London, they used to print everything upstairs on the top floor. ![]() "I had photos before, but I didn't really seek them out," she says. He opened her eyes to photographs as something to collect and own. It helps that so much of it is byĪ modern master whose pictures embody exactly what she is talking about.Ĭoddington, who turned 73 in April, worked regularly with Weber from 1980 on. ![]() Something just happened, something is about to happen." The same idea could be applied to a lot of the work on her walls. "In that one picture, you can feel a whole story. "A narrative doesn't have to be 10 pages, it can be one picture," she says, pointing to a Coddington has always been a storyteller with her styling. She certainly owns enough of them to constitute a hoard, but the particular narrative sensibility that threads images as diverse as Joseph Szabo's sulky '70s teen and Édouard Boubat's 1947 portrait of his wife Lella betrays the point of view of a collector. The photos lining Coddington's walls are something else altogether. "We start out on a fashion shoot with a girl who has no clothes on, and we build from that: the hair, the makeup, the clothes. "Strip away the clothes and focus on the nude." Hence the title of the auction (viewable at from May 1 to 16), slightly arch in light of Coddington's role as the creative director of Vogue: "No Clothes." Even though she was keen to curate something within the area for which she is best known, she made peace with its polar opposite by reconceptualizing the nude as a kind of canvas for her work. "We felt it was the best way to celebrate the artist and the quality of photography," says Gilkes. And they didn't want fashion pictures-I guess they don't sell for as much-so then they said nudes." "If there's one thing I'm known for, it's 'Don't crop a picture.' I want the feet in it. "I thought it would be fashion pictures, so I said yes, and then it turned out to be portraits," says Coddington. Co-founder of the online auction house Paddle8, first approached her it wasn't because of her knack with nudes.
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