Britney Spears

Two directors built and dismantled the same image, and everything here happens between them.

Nigel Dick shot four of the five earliest videos here — "...Baby One More Time", "Sometimes", "(You Drive Me) Crazy" and "Oops!...I Did It Again" — which is to say he shot the whole arrival. Ten years earlier the same man had filmed Guns N' Roses in "Sweet Child O' Mine" and "Welcome to the Jungle", and he remains the most prolific director in this archive: nearly a hundred videos, from Sunset Strip metal to a school corridor in 1998.

That corridor was not his idea, and he has never pretended otherwise. The label wanted something animated and superheroic — Spears later described it as "this really bizarre video idea, this animated Power Ranger-y thing" — and Dick's own treatment, by his account, "sucked". The schoolgirl setting came from Spears, who asked at a fitting whether she shouldn't be wearing a school uniform. They bought one from Kmart. The most recognisable image in teen pop was a seventeen-year-old's suggestion and a department-store purchase.

Then Joseph Kahn arrived, and came back twice more across eight years — "Stronger" in 2000, "Toxic" in 2004, "Womanizer" in 2008. Each time the assignment was roughly the same: take apart what the earlier videos had established. "Stronger" gave her a chair instead of a chorus line. "Toxic" put her through a run of separate identities in one clip. "Womanizer" did it again in disguises, and let the disguises carry the song.

Between those two runs the catalogue reads like a directory of the era's pop specialists. Wayne Isham shot "I'm Not a Girl, Not Yet a Woman" in 2001 — the same director with eleven Bon Jovi videos and Metallica's "Enter Sandman" behind him. Bille Woodruff took two. Dave Meyers took "Lucky". And David LaChapelle, better known as a fashion photographer, made "Everytime" in 2004, the one that trades choreography for a bathtub and a hotel corridor.

Twelve videos across ten years, every one of them credited — and the two names that recur are a hard rock veteran and a man who kept being hired to undo him.