Mert Alas and Marcus Piggott

Look closely at the skin in a Mert Alas and Marcus Piggott photograph and something is off in the most deliberate way. The pores have been smoothed to enamel, the highlights sit like drops of water on wax, and the color of a mouth or a bruise-dark eyeshadow reaches a saturation no room, no lamp, no actual face ever produced. The picture is not lying about the model. It is lying about the world she stands in, and it wants you to notice.

This TASCHEN volume gathers two decades of that deliberate lying, a heavy, generous survey of one of fashion photography's most identifiable partnerships. The Turkish-born Mert Alas and the Welsh-born Marcus Piggott began working as one in the mid-1990s, and the credit line stayed fused: two people, one eye, no visible seam between them. Their pictures ran in W, in Vogue Paris, in Interview, and their campaigns sold Givenchy, Miu Miu, Lancome. The famous faces are all here, Kate Moss and Madonna and Bjork and Gisele among them, though the face that matters most in any spread is the constructed one, the version of a person that exists only after the retouching is done.

The technique is where the pages earn their keep. These are not caught moments; they are built ones. Light gets sculpted into hard, glossy planes, and then post-production pushes color past documentary truth into something closer to painting. Reds go molten. Skin turns to lacquer, and a background that started grey becomes an impossible teal. The pair have described their aim, in the volume's own framing, as making a picture feel more vivid and more present than the moment that produced it, and the paradox drives everything: the more they manipulate, the more the subject seems to arrive.

The two-photographer arrangement is stranger than it sounds, and the pictures never betray it. There is no his-and-hers to spot, no division of labor visible in the frame, only a single sensibility that happens to run on two pairs of hands. Whatever negotiation happens on set stays off the page, which is its own quiet lesson about shared authorship: the vision has to survive the committee or it dies there.

Certain motifs recur until they read as a grammar: wet surfaces, latex and patent leather catching a hard key light, a face turned three-quarters so the cheekbone throws its own small shadow. Repeated across campaigns and covers, these devices stop looking like tricks and start functioning as vocabulary, the private alphabet a long partnership builds when the same two people keep solving the same problem.

What a studio photographer can take from this is not the specific look, which is expensive and locked to its moment, but the discipline underneath it. Every element is decided. Nothing is left to the room. The gloss that reads as excess is actually control, exercised from the set to the final file, and it argues that a house style is a set of choices repeated until they harden into a signature.

There is a fair objection to all of this. When every image is pushed to the same high-gloss extreme, the individual subject can start to vanish into the treatment, and a Madonna and an unknown can end up wearing the same skin. The survey does not fully escape that flattening. Page through enough spreads and the surfaces blur together, and the very consistency that makes the work recognizable also makes it, in bulk, a little airless. The strongest pictures survive it because a specific gesture or gaze pushes back through the polish, refusing to be fully sanded down.

The pictures are honest about their own dishonesty, and that is where the integrity sits. They never pretend to be candid, never pose as documents of a real afternoon. A photographer who knows exactly how far they mean to leave reality behind will always look more assured than one hedging toward a realism they do not believe in. Commit or do not; the half-measure is what looks amateur.

The production supports the argument. The pages are large, the color prints dense and clean, and the blacks hold without swallowing the shadow detail those glossy highlights depend on. Go back to the enamel skin near the front. Look at the single drop of light on a lower lip, set with the care of a jeweler placing a stone. Nobody found that. Somebody decided it.