Glen Luchford reinvigorated British commercial photography in the early 1990s in such magazines as i-D and The Face. His images for the 1997 campaign for the Italian fashion house Prada received considerable acclaim. Luchford’s work to date has been mysterious and suggestive of film stills where the motivations of the central characters must be unravelled and completed in the mind of the viewer.

This photograph comes from the final campaign that Luchford worked on for Prada. His photographs for the fashion house marked the ‘top end’ of contemporary fashion photography and re-established beautiful, classic, fashion imagery in advertising campaigns.

It is a dye-destruction print, made using print material that has at least three emulsion layers, each one sensitised to one of the three different primary colours of light - red, blue or green - and each one containing a dye related to that colour. During exposure to the negative, each layer records different information about the colour make-up of the image. During printing, the dyes are destroyed or preserved to form a full-colour image in which the three emulsion layers are perceived as one. Dye-destruction prints are characterised by vibrant colour. The process used to be called Cibachrome; it is now known as Ilfochrome.