Alfred Seiland: Dress by Nicholas Ghesquiere for Balenciaga, from “Hanging Gardens: When the Bloom is on the Line,” 2004

This image by Austrian photographer Alfred Seiland was first published on May 16, 2004, in the New York Times Magazine and is featured in The New York Times Magazine Photographs (Aperture, 2011), edited by Kathy Ryan. Ryan, longtime director of photography for the magazine, recollects: “My first instinct often is to bring in photographers who might not normally be shooting a particular kind of work. There were a lot of beautiful flowered prints that season, which led me to think of Alfred Seiland, an Austrian landscape photographer. I remembered seeing a picture by him of sheets hanging on clotheslines, years before, and that was a direct inspiration.”

Here, Seiland plays with the façade of the colorful dress against an equally bright and textured background of orange and red flowers. As is conventional for his works, this image is part of a series, and when seen together the photographs have a pictorial language of their own. Created through the use of color and other contrasting elements, the images suggest a mood and space that seems to exist only in and for that picture.

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