With her trusty Canon SLR camera in hand, the artist and upper-crust photographer Jessica Craig-Martin documented some of the glitziest benefits, film premieres, and high-society soirées of the 1990s for a variety of glossy publications. But her knowing, unconventionally cropped snapshots—of sweaty air kisses between socialites long past the first bloom of youth, the garish accoutrements of wealth, and often uncomfortable behind-the-scenes moments—are less celebratory portraits than a permanent record of the alarming concentration of riches that characterized the decade. “They’re about the underbelly that lies just below society’s stained silk cummerbund,” says Craig-Martin, who, just like her raw and unflinching photos, doesn’t pull punches. The rise of gossip tabloids, 24-hour cable news, and paparazzi culture, she says, meant that “the polite veneer of gold leaf could not hold as it had 100 years before.” The access her camera provided allowed Craig-Martin to witness the decade’s excesses like no one else. “I slipped on a sequined Bill Blass hem, as it were,” she says, half-jokingly, “and landed in the molten epicenter of New York society’s most flagrant vanities and aspirations.”
“I attended the amfAR Gala in Cannes several times in the ’90s,” says Craig-Martin. “This event was the proverbial cherry on the meringue on the profiterole on the gâteau of the entire 10 days that are also allegedly a film festival. In 1997, Prince Albert of Monaco’s date appeared to be wearing a hairy pineapple on her head, to which she had attached a tiny veil—for discretion, I presumed? After all, you don’t want people to remember you as the one who wore the hairy pineapple to the gala.”
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Photographs courtesy Nathalie Karg Gallery and Jessica Craig-Martin
