Vantage Point

Just Off to the Sidelines, Artist Landon Nordeman Subverts Today’s Fantasies.

- Joshua Glass

FEW IF ANY guidelines mark Landon Nordeman’s process of work. His colorful pictures elicit thoughtful pauses in spite of their typically directional subjects: a portrait of a fashion designer with his head severed by the image’s top frame; a posh socialite decanted, struggling to exit her town car. An almost-extraterrestrial suspension of reality occurs in these moments as the photographer offers an obscured and yet intimate perspective on fashion in an inescapable vibrancy. Journeying across the globe for nearly 10 fashion seasons, this super-saturated surveillance has now been captured and condensed in Nordeman’s very first book of photography, “Out of Fashion,” a witty, visual tribute to the often missed moments from the world of style.

“I don’t believe that you need to actually show any faces. There are no rules in photography. There are no rules of where you can point the camera,” says the artist in his sunlit studio in New York’s West Chelsea Arts Building. “I like the idea of surprise. The photographer’s role is to not only notice the things that we see when we’re walking down the street, but to photograph them in a way that’s clear what the intention is—clear what you noticed.”