Into The Blue

Whether private or public, empty or imitated, the swimming pool has been Vogue's backdrop du jour for almost 100 years. Here, Robin Muir deep dives into a ...

The swimming pool as narrative scene-stealer reached its zenith in the 1970s with the off-kilter tableaux of Guy Bourdin and the most voyeuristic of Helmut Newton’s pictures. Vogue’s first colour photographic cover, taken by Edward Steichen in 1932, which you can see below – a linear poolside arrangement of model in swimming cap reaching skywards with a beach ball – was made in the studio (perhaps the vagaries of light and climate were too risky for such an historic moment). So too George Hoyningen-Huene’s much reproduced “The Divers” from 1930. In the wrong hands it’s a fashion photographic cliché, but like the streets of New York you know, for the most part, what you’re going to get.