Few photographers have shaped the visual language of celebrity and style quite like Stephanie Pfriender Stylander. A defining force behind some of the most iconic fashion and portrait imagery of the 1990s and 2000s, Pfriender Stylander helped launch the careers of cultural figures we now consider legends, most famously photographing a then-unknown Kate Moss on the streets of New York in 1992, capturing a raw, cinematic energy that would help catapult her into superstardom.

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With an eye deeply influenced by the French New Wave, Pfriender Stylander’s work goes far beyond beauty; it reveals character, vulnerability, and truth. Her portraits of Hollywood A-listers, musicians, and supermodels defined an era of editorial storytelling for publications like French Glamour, GQ, Interview, and Harper’s Bazaar. Each image radiates the same sensual grit and psychological depth that continues to inspire today’s most celebrated photographers, stylists, and artists.

Today, Pfriender Stylander remains as relevant and visionary as ever. Her work is housed in prestigious private and museum collections worldwide, including that of renowned collector Nicola Erni, who recently featured Pfriender Stylander’s iconic photograph of Kate Moss in her new book Mix & Match. Her images continue to command attention at the most important international photography fairs, where only the world’s leading galleries and artists are invited to exhibit. In 2025, her work was featured at Photo Basel with Sophie Scheidecker, as well as at AIPAD with Staley-Wise Gallery. Beyond her celebrated photography, Pfriender Stylander is now pushing her creative boundaries even further, exploring mixed-media and photo-transfer art that expands upon her signature layering and collage techniques.

BIOGRAPHY

Stephanie Pfriender Stylander was born in New York. She began photographing fashion for editorial clients such as French Glamour, GQ, Interview and Harper’s Bazaar in the 1990s, which led to portrait assignments of prominent actors and musicians. Her fashion and portrait work was re-introduced in 2019 with the publication of her first book The Untamed Eye.

One of her prominent shoots was of Kate Moss who was unknown when she posed on the streets of New York in 1992 for Pfriender Stylander, who likened her to Anna Karina in the films of Jean-Luc Godard. Pfriender Stylander’s photographs for magazines and advertisements in the 1990s and 2000s celebrate a sensuality and grittiness, revealing character and psychological truth, inspired by the French New Wave cinema.

Stephanie Pfriender Stylander’s atmospheric and cinematic fashion photos embody the spirit of the 1990s. — video by Dongo News

In 2025, Pfriender Stylander began working in the studio with photo transfers, acrylic paint and mixed media onto canvas. From the beginning of her career, she focused on repetition of image, layering imagery, collage and so designed many editorial pages for the magazines. Now she has returned to this process of multiples with new technique and form.

Pfriender Stylander’s photographs have been included at Paris Photo, Photo Basel, Photo London, Photo Shanghai, AIPAD New York, Barcelona’s Festival International de la Photo de Mode and housed in the Nicola Erni Collection and other museum and private collections worldwide. In 2022, her work was included at the Norton Museum of Art, Palm Beach, A Personal View on High Fashion & Street Style; Photographs from the Nicola Erni Collection, 1930’s to Now. In 2021, Pfriender Stylander had a solo exhibition in Paris, New York City Lockdown with Galerie Sophie Scheidecker. She had a joint exhibition with Louise Dahl-Wolfe, 2 Women of Style at the Staley-Wise Gallery, New York in 2020. Her work has received numerous awards from American Photography, Communication Arts, International Photography Awards, and The Lucie Foundation.

She is a graduate from the School of Visual Arts, New York with a Bachelor of Fine Arts in photography and an Associate of Science in Photography from Endicott College, Massachusetts.

She is represented by the Staley-Wise Gallery, New York, Sophie Scheidecker, Paris, Ira Stehmann Fine Art, Munich, and Izzy Gallery, Toronto.

Pfriender Stylander lives and works in New York City.

Please find works here: stephaniepfrienderstylander.com.

Stylander Stands as Defining Force in Iconic Fashion and Portrait Imagery

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BIOGRAPHY