The year was 1993. Bill Clinton was in the White House, Nirvana was blazing across America on their In Utero tour, Prince had his name legally changed to a made-up, unpronounceable glyph made out of gender-symbols, and prolific fashion photographer Steven Meisel, at the top of his game, was fresh from his completion of Sex, Madonna’s cult book, naked exposé and provocative look at sexual fantasies through photos and words. Over the next 12 months, Meisel would go on to shoot a total of 28 international Vogue covers, together with more than 100 internal editorial stories, celebrity portraits and major advertising campaigns.

It was a most unusual year – a particularly pivotal point in Meisel’s career – all while the image-maker was churning out spectacular work with exactingly high caliber, from his studio in New York City. For Meisel, 1993 was a blitz of unbridled creativity. Almost 30 years on and in a rare return to the Meisel archives, the first-ever Meisel-dedicated exhibition is showing in A Coruña – a port city in the Galicia region of northwest Spain. Its focus: the enigmatic annum of 1993.

Entitled, Steven Meisel 1993: A Year in Photographs, the exhibition is filled with era-defining images culled from the photographer’s flush of fashion stories of that year. The works are housed in a beautiful exhibition space that Elsa Urquijo designed for the MOP Foundation – Inditex chair Marta Ortega Pérez’s initiative to bring cutting-edge exhibitions and world-class culture to A Coruña and promote the region of Galicia’s “rich cultural spirit to the world.”

Illustrating his vision of a post-grunge landscape, the exhibition opens with a small sequence of street photographs that capture passing women mid-motion. These were taken when Meisel was in the sixth grade, if you can believe it, and like mini-Garry Winogrands seen here for the first time they seem to hint at what’s to come in his career. Carrying on, a rich tapestry of supermodels can be seen, with Meisel also lensing the likes of Barbara Streisand, Kyle MacLachlan and Madonna. An artfully arranged 60-page feature on men’s fashion for Per Lui, crops up later, constructed from over 100 portraits of famous fashion and film figures including Amanda Harlech and Twiggy laminated in leopard print.

Also featured Meisel’s iconic Anglo-Saxon Attitudes series – featured in the December issue of British Vogue – starring Bella Freud (daughter of Lucien Freud), writer and author Plum Sykes and art dealer and former fashion model Honor Fraser. Elsewhere, Naomi Campbell and Carla Bruni strut side-by-side: tweed mini skirts seductively hiked up their thighs, handbags dangling from the crook of their arms and hair blown behind their shoulders. Linda Evangelista’s no frills au naturel pageboy haircut is a highlight too. A wild-eyed Kristen McMenamy is perched, barefoot, atop a cement city wall and Isabella Blow poses with Azzedine Alaïa’s pooch. In another image, a well-documented Evangelista and Christy Turlington are caught mid-pillow fight with feathers flying all around. And then there’s the late Stella Tennant with her kohl-rimmed eyes, rocking a pierced septum and suited in a fuzzy two piece along some residential road in London.

In 1993, Meisel refined his eye and honed in on his particular point of view as a preeminent fashion photographer. These fascinating images are the summation of everything that Steven has learnt over the course of his extraordinary career – they’re some of the most remarkable, important and interesting fashion photographs ever taken. What you really see is him; his obsession with beautiful people, his encyclopedic knowledge of all aspects of fashion, his mental inventory of models and designers and his meticulous attention to detail.

Meisel is a true master of the camera, an era-defining creative whose feverish output and unparalleled respect for aesthetics enabled his ascent to the pinnacle of his profession, even nurturing numerous careers of models, transforming them into household names with the massive impact of his work. He amplified the models’ featured in this exhibition especially, perhaps none more so than Linda Evangelista.

Widely admired for his reach beyond the surface to capture the true personality of his subject, always transcending their context, and a career characterised by hit after hit, he leaves in his cosmic wake a titillating trail of intuitive sights and stories.

Photography by Steven Meisel. ‘Steven Meisel 1993: A Year in Photographs’, is open to the public, free of charge, at A Coruña, Galicia, Spain, through to May 1, 2023.

meisel93-coruna.com