In the fall of 2007—long before backstage was a thing and the flash of a camera was as ubiquitous behind the scenes as it is on the runway—German photographer Anna Bauer received an assignment from The Daily and road-tripped her way from London to Milan to Paris, shooting models, stylists, and a host of other fashion types along the way. She used a large-format Polaroid camera and captured the industry’s central figures in spontaneous form—flagging down designers such as Raf Simons and models like Kate Moss (above) and Raquel Zimmermann (below) during quiet moments and approaching them with boldness, trepidation, and sometimes total naiveté. “When I shot David Sims, I didn’t know who he was,” she recalled at the launch of her book, Backstage, last February. The results are eye-catching—a collection of raw, oft-revealing black-and-white portraits of the people who make the shows run.
Anna Bauer’s Polaroids will be on view from September 5 to November 3 at the Loewe store, located at Calle Serrano, 26, Madrid, Spain.