Carolyn Murphy in Saint-Tropez: Restraint, Light, and the End of the Nineties

In 1999, Mario Testino photographed Carolyn Murphy in Saint-Tropez for Harper’s Bazaar, producing a fashion editorial that would come to stand quietly apart from the era’s prevailing visual noise. Shot over the course of a story rather than a single frame, the images resisted excess in favour of clarity and restraint. Among them, one black-and-white photograph has endured with particular force. Murphy is turned slightly to her left, her gaze directed away from the camera. She wears a white Gucci ensemble and a white beanie, her silhouette pared back, her presence composed. The image does not announce itself. It holds.

At the end of the 1990s, fashion imagery often oscillated between high-gloss provocation and overt sensuality. This editorial occupied a different register. Testino removed surplus gesture, allowing posture, light, and atmosphere to carry the narrative. Across the sequence, Murphy appears attentive without being performative, present without insistence. The images resist storyline in favour of mood. They feel suspended, caught between movement and stillness.

Published as a near full-bleed double-page spread in Harper’s Bazaar, the story was given space rarely afforded to editorial photography. Its scale allowed the viewer to register subtle shifts in stance and expression across the images. On the page appeared a quotation from Tom Ford, then Creative Director of Gucci, reflecting on Liz Tilberis, Harper’s Bazaar’s late Editor-in-Chief. The words were not addressed to Murphy, but they framed the editorial within a moment of reflection and loss at the magazine. Tilberis had been instrumental in shaping Harper’s Bazaar’s visual language throughout the decade, and her absence lent the spread a quieter gravity. In retrospect, the editorial reads as part of that elegiac moment.

Murphy herself occupied a distinctive position within fashion at the time. More than a model, she embodied a particular kind of American poise that resonated internationally. Testino had a long-standing sensitivity to this quality. He photographs Murphy not as an icon but as a presence, attentive to the way she occupies space rather than how she performs for the lens. Under Ford’s direction, the white Gucci look becomes less a fashion statement than a tonal field, amplifying the editorial’s clarity.

Saint-Tropez functions here as suggestion rather than spectacle. There is no overt Riviera glamour, no reliance on location as shorthand. Instead, the environment recedes. Light does the work. What remains is the relationship between subject and photographer. Testino’s camera does not insist. It observes.

Over time, the editorial’s images have taken on a second life beyond the magazine page. The black-and-white photograph has moved into institutional and gallery contexts, appearing in Portraits at the National Portrait Gallery in London and its subsequent international tour, before being revisited in Extremes at Yvon Lambert Gallery in Paris and HEAT at de Pury de Pury in Dubai. In each setting, the image shifts in emphasis. What reads as restraint in print becomes composure on the wall. What feels intimate in a magazine becomes sculptural when scaled and framed.

Seen today, Carolyn Murphy, Saint-Tropez, Harper’s Bazaar, 1999 feels emblematic of Testino’s ability to articulate mood without instruction. It was never intended as a defining statement, yet it has come to represent a moment when fashion photography could afford to be quiet. The late 1990s were a period of transition in editorial leadership and image-making. This photograph holds that moment in balance, poised between confidence and uncertainty.

What endures is the image’s refusal to overstate itself. Testino allows silence to operate as content. Murphy’s turned gaze does not invite pursuit. It invites pause. In doing so, the photograph affirms one of Testino’s most consistent instincts: that presence, when observed carefully, carries more weight than performance.