What is Fashion Photography?The history of fashion photography is inseparable from that of fashion itself. Though it drew its visual inspiration from modern art, the fashion image was also concerned with the creation of consumer desire. Both are linked to the growth of capitalist economies and the development of mass markets. As a measure of social standing, fashion has been a part of Western culture since the Renaissance. Some historians observe the frequently changing clothing styles as a distinctively Western habit among urban populations. It was not until the early nineteenth century, however, that it emerged as a widespread cultural and commercial phenomenon. Part of industrialized Europe’s new individualist mentality, mass fashion emerged into a burgeoning culture of spectacle, self-development and material enjoyment, gaining a social and cultural significance that had previously been available only to society’s elite. The modern couturier was no mere dressmaker, but was celebrated as an artist and a creative genius, despite the tacit knowledge that he or she was bound to the vagaries of consumer desire in a way that other artists were not.
Fashion photography comprises a wide array of practices (editorial and advertising, beauty, portraiture and documentary photography, to name a few) and involves a range of skilled creative and businesspeople (stylists, photographers, models, advertisers, artists, designers, hairstylists, creative and artistic directors, makeup artists, set builders and so on), brought together by shared goals and contexts. Fashion photography therefore is often seen as less free to be outspoken about the world that it represents. Critics, as well as a significant number of fashion-industry creative’s don’t believe that fashion photography is capable of saying anything of real political or social significance. The difference between the artistic and the merely decorative or commercial as Abigail Solomon-Godeau notes with critical intent –“the sleazy and decidedly uneuphoric insistence on the visibility of class, its injuries, and its violence that distinguishes art photography from other forms”. Art has always influenced fashion, and there have been instances when earlier fashion photographs have been perceived as art. Photographers like Edward Steichen, Cecil Beaton, Irving Penn and Richard Avedon, could be artist and others mere commercial professionals.
The Media, social, political, and cultural influences have a significant effect on how fashion is viewed. An important part of fashion is fashion journalism. Editorial critique and commentary can be found in magazines, newspapers, on television, fashion websites, social networks and in fashion blogs. Using creative talent, modern fashion also depends upon image and advertising spectacles. The visual presentation of fashion quickly became as important as the production of garments itself. The fashion garment gained meaning and relevance for the consumer through its reproduction and circulation as an image. Despite television and increasing internet coverage, including fashion blogs, press coverage remains the most important form of publicity in the eyes of the industry. Fashion photography therefore becomes an important element of the fashion advertising industry.
If photography can distort reality, fashion photography is really far from the truth, its sole intent the creation of capital. In 1967, in The Society of the Spectacle,
Guy Debord anatomized that visible universe and its relation to capital; he saw it as a world colonized by false desires and illusions, epitomized by the ubiquity of the commodity form. In many respects the fashion show is the paradigm of Debord’s notion of spectacle, which he described as narcissistic, self-absorbed and self-referential. The spectacle, according to Debord is ‘capital become an image’. The sight of the journalists and photographers at work in the fashion show reveals both sides of the way in which capital is constructed as image, first in the show itself and in its dissemination by the press.
Fashion photography’s coupling with industry and commerce, its frivolous and ephemeral role in the marketing and selling of garments and the questionable part it plays in the construction of feminine identity is undeniable. Bruce Checefsky, of ‘The Cleveland Institute of Art’ writes ‘The invention of photography in the 1830s brought voyeurism to the masses. It made public what was previously only imagined and secret. The great early erotic–pornographic photographers proved that high shock value and intense sensuality compelled the reader to pay attention, willingly or otherwise. Nineteenth century fashion photographers learned this lesson quickly. Desire has always been the common objective of pornography and fashion photography’. He continues, ‘Pornography undermines the power dynamics between male and female, photographer and subject. It reinforces crude, restrictive sex-role stereotypes and standards of beauty’. Mainstream erotic–pornographic imagery is as polished as fashion photographs from publishers Condé Nast or the Hearst Corporation’.
Glamour and fashion photography generally stops short of showing explicit sex but it is intended to be erotic. According to Jennifer Craik, ‘fashion images constantly play with definitions of sexuality, their conventions neither fixed nor purposeful. Rather they are a nexus between fashion and selfhood; the desire generated for consumers is constantly being reconfirmed as natural’.
The 1960s marked a turning point in sexually explicit photography. Fashion magazines explored the sexual and social codes in clothing and gesture; style, elegance, and social status gave way to overtly sexual narratives. By the late 1960s, however, nudity in fashion magazines had lost its shock value; it had become common. Sex today is more obsessive than the liberating 1960s and our visual culture is increasingly crowded with images of it. The influence of pornography on both Glamour and fashion photography is undisputable. Fashion trends construct gender identities that reflect our sexual fantasies. Fetish subcultures and an attraction to fashion’s dark side have provided designers and photographers with a rich source of material for decades.
The anatomy of movie stars and fashion models Models are the human subjects of fashion photography.
Agents, or bookers, represent models, get work for them, and in return take a percentage of their earnings.
Clients include a range of people who use a model’s services, whether or not they directly pay for it, potentially including photographers, magazine editors, stylists designers, catalogue houses, advertising agencies, hair and makeup artists, show event producers, art buyers and casting directors.
Ordinary people are largely absent from fashion photography. Historically, it is the beautiful, the wealthy or the famous who sell the designer garments promoted by fashion magazines and mass-market advertising. Movie stars are perfect as models for fashion photography. Fashion, it seems, cannot live without the movie star as its most valuable model. For the designer, it means effective advertising: ‘having the right star wear your clothes at a high-profile event is worth tens of millions of dollars in advertising’. For the movie star, a fashion photograph is a means of reinforcing and maintaining his or her stardom.
Models, in contrast, generally show no continuity at all in fashion photography (supermodels being the only exception), as they simply do their job: to present the latest fashion. For models, modelling means ‘working’. As for stars, modelling means ‘one way of displaying his or her star qualities, The fashion photograph of a movie star, then, is more complex than that of a model. In part, this is because the fashion photograph must always respect the continuity within the star’s image or persona. Movie stars, models, and the fashion photograph combine powerfully to seduce the consumer.
The professional/amateur model is an object, human flesh turned into an image. Even when radically manipulated, the body does not stray far from the raw materials of youth, thinness and beauty that the model has always supplied and the fashion industry nearly always demanded. Agents construct different personas for the model, each of which is easily recognizable to clients as a particular type. The model’s racial background and the market that he or she is working in also play an important part in casting the particular type. (For example you cannot use Japanese, Chinese or Korean models for a market that demands ‘brown-skinned Bollywood’ or vice versa).
Susan Sontag notes on the fashion model: “Like photographs, which function as both an index and distortion of reality, models are a contradictory medium. They must simultaneously exhibit an infinite mutability while being faithfully transparent: constantly transforming, constantly themselves.”
Roland Barthes says of the fashion model (or, to use his term, ‘the cover girl’) is limited, but what little he does say challenges the notion that the essential function of the fashion model is aesthetic – rather, she is an absolute body, which signifies only as fashion. He writes, ‘it is not a question of delivering a “beautiful body”, subject to the canonic rules of plastic success, but a “deformed” body with a view to achieving a certain formal generality’ That this body belongs to an individual as well as having ‘the value of an abstract institution’ represents a rare structural paradox: between these two conditions there is no ‘drift’. That is, there can be no empirical instance of this ‘ideal, incarnate body’ – it exists only in the image.
Once a model has become successful, as is the case with super models; he or she transcends national or ethnic categories and clients begin to ask for him or her by name. Even in these situations, however, racial and national categories remain important. When a model becomes successful, the categories of identification become public and uncontrollable by the agent. As Jennifer Craik notes: around 1990s models like Christy Turlington, Naomi Campbell, Linda Evangelista, Claudia Schiffer and Cindy Crawford promoted a “formulaic recipe for a ‘technical beauty’ with a Darwinian undertone: tall, thin, and rich”.
Artificial ideals in the fashion photograph.A fashion photograph is never true to humanity, as French art historian & poet
Henri Focillon, writes in the early 1930s, ‘fashion invents an artificial humanity’. ‘Such a humanity,’ he continues, ‘obeys much less the rule of rational propriety than the poetry of ornament, and what fashion calls line or style is perhaps but a subtle compromise between a certain physiological canon…and a pure fantasy of shapes’.
In speaking of ‘a subtle compromise’ he touches upon an aspect of fashion that is often underplayed – the limitations imposed on it by the body. Both in illustration and then in photography, which had to contend with the more troublesome medium of flesh and bone, the faults of nature have been modified. In many regards, digital manipulation of the image is a continuation of older techniques that airbrushed the image of a model into the state of perfection that is usually required in fashion’s world of a sleek, wrinkle free humanity. In the digitally manipulated image there is no original, using digital technology the solid elements of the conventional photograph are dissolved into a kaleidoscope of pixels that can, writes Robin Derrick, be ‘seamlessly altered, blended and mixed together’, making ‘anything possible’
Artifice lies at the very core of fashion’s existence. Fashion defies nature, constantly attempting to create and re-create its image of beauty over the human body. The fashion image advocates artifice, perfection and glamour, thereby imposing unrealistic aesthetic standards upon women and encouraging acts of imitation. The models themselves seem as artificial as their environment, beyond human in their flawless beauty and deceptive smiles. The real body approaches the ideal of airbrushed humanity in order to maintain the unattainable level of perfection. As Dutch photographer, Inez van Lamsweerde tacit has commented, “You could never find this girl once, much less twice – an artificial humanity, cloned according to the DNA of fashion.
A process of creating an artificial ideal also occurs with the body of the fashion model, which is drained of any biological realities. Professor Elizabeth Wilson from the London College of Fashion notes in
Adorned in Dreams: Fashion and Modernity; ‘this is the body as an idea rather than as an organism’. In other words, the fashion-model body does not introduce anything new, anything biological, into the image, but can only be a reiteration of that which is already present – ‘fashion’. Barthes makes a similar point, he writes, ‘the world, everything which is not the garment, is exorcized, rid of all naturalism: nothing plausible remains but the garment’
There can be no doubt as to the narcissism of fashion photography, having rejected the model provided by nature, it turns to itself as the ideal and creates something ‘nearer to its heart desire’, something that is beyond perfection.
Fashion photography in the Age of kaliAccording to Hinduism and Buddhism we are currently in the age of Kali Yuga, ruled by Kali, the dark mother, Shakti’s wrathful aspect, who liberates trough decapitating. The Kali Yuga could be looked upon as the goddess Shakti throwing a fit. When such a powerful deity (feminine Shakti energy), goes berserk the entire Earth suffers and strains from her fury.
In the modern world, we became obsessed with material goods, hypnotized by false needs, possessed by our possession. The modern fast-paced changes in fashion embody many of the negative aspects of capitalism: it results in waste and encourages people qua consumers to buy things unnecessarily. Kali Yuga humanity, deprived of proper nurturing, has become devious, without a soul and insatiably greedy. Electronic culture created soulless replacements for collective rituals- television supplanted tribal rituals told around a fire; fast food took place of a shared meal. We had substituted matter for mother and objects for emotional bonds.
Sexuality is shrouded in aggression and mistrust. Young women’s bodies are endlessly used as props to sell products. Fashion Photographers still exposed the body (specially the female body) with blatant sexuality; the playful and sometimes perverse eroticism between body and clothes promoted sexual liberation. David Bailey, was the prototype fashion photographer–hero of the 1960s, was a young London-based member of the “Terrible Three,” which also included Terrence Donovan and Brian Duff y. Bailey’s fashion photographs were stark, streetwise, and spontaneous beyond anything done before. His images were sexually charged by his notorious personal and professional relationships where the camera-as-penis was the only thing between the viewer and the female subject. This type of fashion imagery is still is still directed toward a male audience and generally emphasizes sexual arousal and desirability.
As a young photographer, I had idolized photographers like David Bailey; my naiveté had epitomized fashion photography to be at the vanguard of photographic art. I had been drawn towards unnatural desires and definitions of beauty while unwittingly confirming these as natural.On our deepest levels, men seem largely unchanged by history. The high incidence of rape in our society suggest that the gender bias remains unchanged at a subconscious level (probably due to the Judeo-Christian beliefs of a monotheist patriarchal God). Women on the other hand are constantly changing, and struggling against thousands of years of male domination. As the psychoanalyst Wilhelm Reich puts it, “Sexually awakened women, affirmed and recognized as such, would mean the complete collapse of patriarchy”.
It is truly difficult to envision what a sex positive culture may be like in the future. ‘Kalis’ wrath is a reaction to the denigration of nature and woman at the core of our culture, as a part of the historical movement to separate and seek transcendence from our bodily nature.
Alex A.A.Fernandes.
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