Uncle Terry at His Best

Terry Richardson made his name shooting celebrities in his New York studio against a white backdrop with a disposable camera aesthetic—hard flash, high grain, subjects stripped of the usual protective layers that editorial lighting provides. The result looked deliberately unprofessional, which made it feel more intimate than anything produced through proper commercial means. His seasonal best-of roundups collected the sharpest work from a given fashion cycle: celebrities, models, musicians, all run through that same raw, slightly confrontational process. Whether you found it electric or exploitative probably said something about you. Either way, the pictures were hard to look away from.