Good news: Glen Luchford’s Atlas exhibition at 10 Corso Como is being extended until December 3rd, so if you were worried about not making it before the 23rd of November, you can finally relax and breathe again.
Luchford’s first-ever solo show doesn’t feel like a retrospective so much as a brain scan, or like walking into someone’s subconscious: images taped raw to the wall, prints overlapping, memories arranged like a film reel that someone forgot to edit. No chronology, no clean timeline, just instinct. It’s messy in a way that makes sense, like opening a drawer that’s been closed for a while, with fragments of a personal archive spilling out.
His origin story starts in Brighton in ’86, when Luchford gets a camera for his 18th birthday, not out of destiny, but because his dad wanted him to share his same hobbies. Usually, that kind of parental persuasion backfires; they love something, so of course you hate it. Music, sport, hobbies, you name it. But photography? For Luchford that was different, it was like a backstage pass, suddenly he could be at the top of skate ramps only because of his camera.
Luchford never cared about belonging to a scene, but he watched everything: Brighton skate ramps, British post-punk, London’s indie editorial scene—Dazed, i-D, The Face—and turned them into a visual language that felt accidental but precise. Even when he shoots high fashion, the photos never look posed; they look like someone caught a moment that wasn’t supposed to be photographed. You see it in Kate Moss throwing a punch in New York, 1994. You see it in Björk stripped and mythic. You see it in Amber Valletta wandering through Cinecittà, lost in a snow labyrinth or adrift on the Tiber at sunset.
But why choose Milan for his first solo exhibition? Well, Italy is where Luchford reshaped fashion twice: first with his Prada campaigns in the mid-90s that feel like outtakes from Tarkovsky or Lynch and then, of course, with Alessandro Michele’s Gucci. You probably remember the Gucci Cruise 2019, where Noah’s Ark came to life with animals wandering among models, or the F/W 2015 with those androgynous muses drifting through Los Angeles buses. Italy is like the place that, in a way, amplified his vision.
What stops the show from feeling like legacy-building is the fact that Luchford doesn’t mythologise himself. He barely shoots outside of work. He doesn’t fantasise about exhibitions or archives. The archive exists because it needs to, not because he worships it. Selecting work for Atlas wasn’t about defining what matters; it was just choosing what felt good in the moment. And that's what makes it real. Atlas is about a career captured instinctively, unpolished and still in motion.
