Dovima and the Elephants, Dress by Dior, Cirque d'Hiver, Paris

Richard Avedon is renowned for his unconventional approach to fashion and portrait photography. His celebrated work, Dovima and the Elephants, 1955, belongs to a series of photographs, here one of an oversize edition, begun by Avedon in Paris in the 1940s, of staging shots in settings, both mundane and theatrical, in which his models became actors, rather than simple mannequins. The resulting "cinematic" quality owes much to Avedon's interest in the work of filmmaker, Ernst Lubitsch.