Y-3 2024 by Max Vadukul
Y-3 is making a long-awaited return to New York City for Fall/Winter 2024. Y-3, the brand is a collaboration between the German-based adidas and designer Yohji Yamamoto, who works between Tokyo and Paris. And - the campaign is photographed by famed fashion photographer Max Vadukul once again, featuring Gabbriette and A$AP Nast.
“Black-and-white is king. King of kings. Color is commercial. You do it to please clients. You do it to make money. If you want emotion, I think you can’t beat black-and-white. It works well with my style. It gets down to the essential very quickly but color brings in a lot of questions so you have to be better prepared. Color is wonderful when you need to show information. Sometimes too much information is not good. Sometimes it’s better not to reveal too much” Max Vadukul.
Vadukul was born 1961 to an Indian family in Nairobi, Kenya. His family moved to Northern London when he was a teenager. He did not complete high school, but developed an interest in photography after his father took a job at the Carl Zeiss lens company. At the age of 16, he ran away from home to escape an arranged marriage.
In 1984, Vadukul produced a by Yohji Yamamoto, who assigned the then 22-year-old Vadukul one of his ad campaigns. Together, they were pure magic. It was the first of several Yamamoto campaigns and thus introduced the photography world to his dynamic movement-filled black-and-white images. Vadukul established his editorial career in the 1990s with a large body of work for French Vogue and Italian Vogue.
From 1996 to 2000 he held the post of The New Yorker’s staff photographer, shooting an average of 52 assignments a year. Other subjects included Al Gore, James Brown, Donald Trump, Natalie Portman, Tom Hanks, Roger Federer, Tilda Swinton, David Geffen, and a group portrait of 40 Nobel laureates. In 1997 he photographed almost the entirety of the magazine's celebrated Indian Fiction issue. After his tenure at The New Yorker he followed its editor, Tina Brown, to become Photo Editor-At-Large of her Talk Magazine.
Vadukul has a long history with music photography. As a lead photographer for Rolling Stone Magazine he took portraits of Amy Winehouse, Mick Jagger and Keith Richards, Bruce Springsteen, Lil Wayne, Kanye West, Justin Timberlake and Christina Aguilera, the Beastie Boys, Florence Welch, and Metallica. He has also photographed several albums including the Rolling Stone's "Bridges to Babylon," Beyonce's "B'Day," and Paul McCartney's "Memory Almost Full." His black-and-white style was utilized most directly, however, by Sting, who asked Vadukul to take the photos for his "Dream of the Blue Turtles" solo album, which was the artist's first after the Police.
