Roxanne Lowit is a New York-based fashion and celebrity photographer who is said to have "become as much a celebrity as those she photographed."
Roxanne Lowit is on location photographing the singer Pharrell Williams and his production partner Chad Hugo outside the Ed Sullivan Theater in New York. As the boys slip in front of her camera, Lowit begins the session when a fan yells out from the crowd, "You're being photographed by a legend!"
After almost three decades of shooting, Roxanne Lowit is as much a celebrity as the icons she photographs. "Some of my most historical pictures come from private and public parties like those of Andy Warhol - he was out all the time," she remembers. As was Salvador Dali, Paloma Picasso, Elizabeth Taylor, and Mick Jagger. Today it's Madonna, George Clooney, Sophia Coppola and Nicolas Cage. Lowit is so much a part of the fashion and pop culture scene that she is, says designer Karl Lagerfeld, "A visual confidant to whom all is revealed." This is nowhere more apparent than in her second book, People.
But Lowit did not go to school to be a photographer. She graduated from the Fashion Institute of Technology in New York with a degree in art history and textile design. It was during her successful career as a textile designer that she realized something. "I paint and there were people who I wanted to sit for me but had no time, so I started taking pictures of them. I liked the gratification of getting the instant image so I traded in my paintbrushes for a camera." Lowit started making pictures in the late 70's with her 110 instamatic, photographing her own designs at the New York fashion shows. Before long she was covering all the designers in Paris where her friends – models like Jerry Hall – would sneak her backstage. It was there that she found her place (and career) in fashion. "For me, that's where it was happening," she says. "No one thought there was anything going on backstage, so for years I was alone and loved it. I guess I made it look too good because now it's so crowded with photographers. But there's enough room for everybody."
Today, her candid photographs of the glamorous and beautiful being spontaneous and having fun have appeared in many magazines, such as Italian Vanity Fair, French Elle, V Magazine, and Glamour, and become a vehicle for much of her advertising work, including campaigns for Dior, Barney's NY and Vivian Westwood. Whether it's a story in German Vogue or an award-winning ad campaign for Emporio Armani, the result is photographs that are stylish, unguarded and outrageously wild. "I'm excited when I'm able to do what I do," she says. "I like crossing all borders and doing all things." Her historic images have also been the center of many one-woman shows throughout Europe and in New York and appeared in the Haute Couture Show at the Metropolitan Museum of Art.
In Lowit's first book, Moments, Lagerfeld deftly defines the legend; "Roxanne is fashion's historian; One whose absence is felt, whose presence is merely sensed."
Naomi Campbell, Christy Turlington, Carla Bruni & Unknown
