Emma Summerton she is not the first woman to photograph the Pirelli calendar but she is perhaps the first to overwhelmingly highlight how creating a calendar, and this Pirelli calendar in particular, is a team effort. The presentation video of “Love letters to the Muse”, as The Cal 2023 is called, now in its 49th edition, is a tribute not only to the photographer and the 14 models immortalized in 28 shots but above all to the collaborators who accompanied Summerton on her journey from conceiving sets to choosing costumes to creating them.
This not only exalts work but also the image of women, indeed of women. Because the Pirelli 2023 calendar showcases different types of women, from every point of view, from size, ethnicity, interests, the requests they promote and the messages they convey.
“My calendar is a celebration of women. I thought of all the women who have inspired me in life, from those I met to actresses, from music to art,” Summerton explained. The underlying theme of the work is the muse and as underlined by the photographer, «I wanted to go back to the etymological root of the word muse. Muse originally represented not only the source of inspiration but also one possessed of talent in literature, science and the arts.
In fact, the 14 models chosen are not all just models in the classic sense of the term and each of them represents an archetype or an artistic profession, an activity, a passion. Among the “muses” there are Guinevere Van Seenus who is portrayed as the photographer because she is also one in reality, as well as being a top model, Ashley Graham who in the calendar is the activist and is known, as well as for the covers, also for her commitment to support body positivity or again Lauren water model who lost her legs to a very serious infection and now walks and runs with prostheses. Wasser is the athlete in photos and in life: she is training with the US Paralympic team.
What unites the photos is the dreamlike style of Emma Summerton. To describe her work, she herself spoke of “magical realism” and this dimension between dream and reality is the hallmark of her work and also one of the reasons that convinced Pirelli to call her.