Lisa Fonssagrives: Three Decades of Classic Fashion Photography.

Lisa Fonssagrives had amazing bones. Trained as a dancer, she knew how to move. She was the first model to earn a place on the cover of Time when that still meant something. To describe what a model and a photographer do, she preferred "sitting" to "shooting" but her favorite word for this collaboration was "seance" - a tonally perfect description of the clothes (Dior, Balenciaga, Rochas), the model (Fonssagrives) in them, and the hypnotic, lush austerity of the photographs by her husband (Irving Penn) that immortalized her.

Due in no small part to David Seidner's adoration of his subject and his brilliance in laying out images, there is a lot of perfection in Lisa Fonssagrives, a collection of photographs by not only Penn but Horst and Louise Dahl-Wolfe, among others, that traces three decades of fashion through the images of one model. Also a photographer, Seidner possesses extensive knowledge of the lives of models early in the century (it's lovely to learn that "Steichen's art-deco siren, Marion Moorehouse," became "Mrs. E. E. Cummings"), but like pins left in a bespoke suit, misspellings poke painfully through the volume's prose, and even though I'm a proponent of gush, Seidner takes it someplace it was never meant to go. Fashion photography's most discerning historian, Martin Harrison, contributes an engaging biographical essay that notes each of Fonssagrives' "five careers - dancer, model, photographer, fashion designer and sculptor," but properly focuses on "her role as model and muse to some of this century's greatest photographers, in Paris from 1936 to 1939 and in New York from 1939 to 1952."

In 1949, Alexander Liberman encouraged Irving Penn, not to take pictures but to observe the Paris collections. "The careful planning bore fruit in Penn's first Paris reportage. This justly celebrated series was published in all three editions of Vogue, American, French and British. There were no duds, but it is no disrespect to the other models who took part, Bettina, Regine and Diane, to suggest the superiority of the photographs of Lisa Fonssagrives." Lightning struck due to a number of converging fronts: Fonssagrives' experience, demeanor, and wisdom (she was almost forty); access to the clothes in daytime; "a north-facing daylight studio. . . with the 'simple three-dimensional clarity'" of real light. All this, combined with the fact that Penn and Fonssagrives were deeply in love, created something revelatory. Looking at their "seance" today, the photos still amaze. Harrison wisely begins his essay trying to imagine what it must have been like to open a mailbox or go to a newsstand and encounter these astounding images.

In almost every photo Fonssagrives' look - precise, angular, shrewd - bears little resemblance to anything going on in fashion today. The magic of the "seance" has been disassembled; in its place is something one might call reality - gritty, shiny, hard-and-loose - but is actually a dream, dark as disaster perhaps, yet still involving dressing-up, escape, and posing. The photo of Fonssagrives closest to the most interesting fashion photography today (Fernand Fonssagrives Le Model, 1942), shows her relaxing and laughing, en deshabille, her long legs in pumps draped over a high-legged chair, her face a reflection in a mirror, suggesting that reflection is what makes a model - her ability to reflect desire, even if it's her own. Le Model has the intimate qualities of a snapshot; it is prescient for revealing the dressing room, not the catwalk, to be the site of fashion.

Off the catwalk is where Juergen Teller's best pictures take place. The clothes of Helmut Lang, models Kristen McMenamy and Annie Morton provide him with his keenest aesthetic correspondence. Many of Teller's photos are standard fare, but in his work for Lang everything clicks. Models pause for champagne and a cigarette, prepping to walk. He captures the somewhat zoned-out atmospherics and zany fun of fashion in details like Robert Clergerie gold-tipped satin pumps or a shirt cuff hitting the edge of one male model's arm cast, and in a variety of model moves (from McMenamy's gorgeous ennui to Cordula Reyer's severity and Cecilia Chancellor's careless joy).

Teller's book, with an interview by Neville Wakefield, makes no claims for itself other than as a retrospective of what he sees as his most salient work. This is not the case for Camilla Nickerson and Neville Wakefield's Fashion. Even though, barring the blurb on the back cover, Fashion has no text, it is curated not edited, and you're left wondering why it's a book instead of a revue de luxe, like Joe McKenna's sumptuous Joe's or Visionaire. Nickerson and Wakefield give their collection of photos a coherent rhythm and mood, but while they may think it a bit of syncopation to include some amazingly weak work by Annie Leibovitz and Catherine Opie, and two lonely shots of a gun and plastic cup by Craig McDean and Nick Knight, they soon raise doubts about the very nature of their project. Not so much their choices (practically every photo is inarguably of the moment, although some photographers repeatedly come across better than others - Corinne Day, Inez van Lamsweerde & Vinoodh Matadin, Saul Fletcher, Steven Klein, Mario Sorrenti, Steven Meisel, to name a few) - but about what they really think of fashion.

Some might find Nickerson and Wakefield's uncontextualized mix of "art" and "fashion" photographs - the work allowed to "speak" for itself, showing how art and fashion photographers draw inspiration from each other - a salubrious advance; I find it lazy. And while Nickerson and Wakefield suggest that there is no qualitative difference between art photography and fashion photography, they shy away from giving the same distinction to all the activities that bring a fashion photograph into existence. Notice that they give no detail about the hairdressers, makeup artists, or stylists involved in the realization of this work; only random mention of models' names, designers' clothes, and the magazines where the work first appeared; and no recognition of model agencies - of the quirky beauty of their names (DNA; Storm).

Lisa Fonssagrives "was always responsible for her own hair and make-up, and placed great emphasis on the utilization of those skills in increasing her range and variety." Times have changed. The necessity of recording who did what wearing whom does not. Harrison writes: "One is faced with a problem familiar to anyone who has tried to research the history of fashion photography. Nothing is perhaps more indicative of its status than the loss of crucial archival material. Vast numbers of key works have been destroyed or lost, and even most of the magazines in which they were reproduced have become extremely scarce." The importance of Nickerson and Wakefield's book lies not in its ability to act as a barometer of today, but to serve as a catalogue and resource of who and what make up fashion now, things that often disappear as quickly as trends are said to.

Bruce Hainley is a contributing editor to Artforum.