Creative Direction
In 1947, KELD HELMER-PETERSEN self-published a book entitled 122 Color Photographs.
Reinterpreting KELD HELMER-PETERSEN's photograph, replacing an original Texaco logo, with Prada's signature. It becomes a "mise en abyme", or in other words a dream within a dream: modernity within modernity and, in its final incarnation as a billboard, architecture within architecture: in other words, Prada within art.
It was, Martin Parr says, 'perhaps the first intelligent book featuring only color photographs and was distinctively Modernist in its look'. The purity and serenity found in the 20th century work of 88 year-old Danish photographer, Keld Helmer Petersen, looks as modern today as it did back in the 1940s, when he first began taking pictures.
Prada's inclination towards art has led the brand into the desert, positioning it as much beneath the earth as above the sky. It is both the summation of architecture and the acretion of time. It should be regarded in this way as both the final adornement of a physical being and its aspiration to be both above and beneath the structure that it may support. It appeals to both origins and destiny.