Miles Aldridge’s photographs are a window into a vivid and terrifying future, or an acid flashback. Colorful housewives inhabit psychedelic rooms and act like delicate monsters: stabbing a birthday cake, filling a car up with trash, screaming in an evening gown.
With their impeccable composition and color coordination, images such as “Actress #6” and “Chromo Thriller #2” harken back to 1960s advertisements, featuring heavily groomed women who never look quite real.
As stunning as his images are, they border on fashion photography, which Aldridge also produces. His work has appeared in Vogue, The New York Times, and The New Yorker. He draws from the films of David Lynch and Federico Fellini, as well as his own father’s graphic design. Combining the surrealistic and dreamlike quality of Lynch and Fellini with a designer’s eye, he merges the two and invents a sensibility that is both controlled and disconcerting.
It’s this strange quality that transports his work outside of the realm of pure aestheticism. His subjects beckon to have their stories told. Coiffed and doll-like, they demand attention, staging a mess. But on closer inspection they aren’t simply behaving badly, they’re aggressively bored. Their actions are nonsensical, yet the reasoning behind their behavior seems perfectly explicit. I only want you to love me, his last exhibition, by its very title suggests that it is a peek into the lives of the lonely who cannot help but amble toward destruction. In Aldridges’ world, they do it in technicolor.
