Storm is Paolo Pellegrin’s contribution to the fifth issue of Fashion Magazine, a publication conceived around the work of one photographer at a time. Published by Silvana Editoriale in 2010, the book gives the Italian photographer and photojournalist an extended editorial field rather than presenting a conventional fashion portfolio or a survey organized by assignment. Its subject is, in an important sense, the circulation of photographs across different visual registers.
Pellegrin constructs the issue from roughly 200 images, bringing aerial views and portraits into contact with fashion photographs and double-page advertising. Some images occupy full spreads, while approximately half appear in color. These shifts of scale, genre and chromatic intensity establish the sequence as the book’s central instrument: meaning arises through placement and juxtaposition, not through a single, continuous report. Documentary observation and the codes of magazine publishing remain distinct, yet are made to exert pressure on one another.
The project is especially revealing in relation to Pellegrin’s established identity as a Magnum member and photojournalist. Here, photographs are not confined to the framework of news or to the retrospective logic of a monograph. Instead, he uses the magazine issue as a complete narrative structure, testing how portraits, elevated viewpoints, fashion imagery and commercial formats can inhabit the same sustained sequence. The result broadens the context in which his photographic language may be read without dissolving its documentary foundations.
For a serious photobook collection, Storm merits attention for this precise meeting of authorship, sequencing and editorial form. It records Pellegrin working within a series previously devoted to individual photographers including Bruce Gilden, Martin Parr, Lise Sarfati and Alec Soth, while retaining a notably heterogeneous image field. Its significance rests not on a claim of rarity, but on the clarity with which it demonstrates the photobook-magazine hybrid as a site of photographic experimentation.
