THE SHOOT.(Profile of fashion photographers Mert Alas and Marcus Piggott)(Interview)

Off the southwestern shore of the Spanish island of Ibiza, a hump of limestone rises more than twelve hundred feet out of the sea. It is called Es Vedra and is said to possess extraordinary powers. Sailors and scuba divers have described compasses and gauges going haywire in its midst. Through the years, there have been reports of strange emanations of light and of sightings of U.F.O.s, and in the mid-nineteenth century a Carmelite priest who spent several weeks on the rocks claimed to have been visited there by the Virgin Mary.

Es Vedra is also the centerpiece of the view from the terrace of a house on Ibiza that belongs to the fashion photographers Mert Alas and Marcus Piggott. Mert and Marcus, as they are known (Mert is pronounced "Matt"), live and work in a whitewashed ten-bedroom Moorish villa situated on a promontory overlooking the Mediterranean. After sharing an apartment in London for seven years, they bought the house last fall and have been using it since then as a photography studio and base of operations, a mini-Cinecitta. It is called Palacio de Salomon and is supposedly built along the lines of Solomon's palace in Jerusalem. One of Mert and Marcus's favorite things about the place is the way that variations in the wind and the light cause the character of Es Vedra to change, from beacon to beast and back again. Recently, they hired a boat and went out there to take pictures, but the steep and rocky terrain proved inhospitable to fashion photography. When I visited them, this summer, in order to watch them shoot a twenty-page spread for Pop, an arty British fashion magazine, Es Vedra was the first thing Mert pointed out to me, to let me know that it was also reputed to be the Isle of the Sirens, from the Odyssey.

"There are supposed to be the Sirens living there, trapping the salesmen," Mert said. "Magnetic energies luring people." By salesmen, Mert, who is a native of Turkey and is prone, in English, at least, to occasional idiomatic deviations, meant sailors, but there are many ways in which the current incarnation of Ibiza--isle of hulking night clubs, all-night Ecstasy raves, foam parties, and fashion shoots--might represent, for a traveller from London or Madrid, a potentially hull-dashing diversion.

Mert and Marcus have been luring a lot of people to Ibiza recently. Success has elevated them into the ranks of those to whom the world must come--the world, in this case, being hairdressers, stylists, models, makeup artists, and manicurists. Katie Grand, the editor of Pop and Mert and Marcus's longtime friend and collaborator, told me, "Their finances have changed and their power has changed, which is why we're here and not in a studio in King's Cross."

Throughout the spring and summer, the pair had a new shoot nearly every week. They photographed fall advertising campaigns for Louis Vuitton, Roberto Cavalli, Missoni, Giorgio Armani, Hugo Boss, Bulgari, and Gucci perfume, as well as editorial spreads for Vogue, W, and Pop. Suddenly, their pictures are everywhere--or, at least, that is what is said of them. It is fair to say, anyway, that Mert and Marcus have been turning up increasingly often. The other thing that is said of them is that they came out of nowhere. "They seem to have just appeared," Grace Coddington, the creative director of Vogue, said. Or, as Ivan Bart, the director of IMG Models, told the Times not long ago, "They are the new fabulous."

Mert, 33, is Turkish; Marcus, 34, is Welsh. Mert is short and chubby; Marcus is tall and slim. Mert is jovial, with a husky laugh; Marcus is measured, with a mischievous grin. When they work, they take turns with the camera--sometimes snatching it from each other--and although Mert's taste may incline a bit more toward campy glamour and Marcus's more toward ironic cool, the results rarely, if ever, betray the dominance of one man's aesthetic over the other's. "When you're looking at the film, you can't tell which of them had the camera," Grand said.

Their pictures tend to be luminous, as though the subjects were lit from within, and to feature odd backgrounds, stark contrasts, and rich color. The models' flesh and hair can appear to be made of plastic. Many of the images have a staged, formal quality, like the nineteen-thirties Hollywood photographs of George Hurrell, but with a sheen that suits the video-game age: Jean Harlow meets S1m0ne. At times, the women seem almost synthetic, and in some respects they are, because Mert and Marcus do a great deal of post-production work. They are known for manipulating their pictures. They shoot ...