The fine art of fashion photography
From a talk given at the Museum of Modern Art, London, by the senior lecturer in art, publishing and music at Oxford Brookes University. Fashion photography is carried out in order to sell clothes; it is a part of the wider advertising industry and exploits desires and aspirations through reference to lifestyles. As such, it is an unapologetic appropriator of styles and techniques. This poses questions about the meaning of street photography if it includes fashion photography and about its place, too, in the canon of art photography. While you might at first see fashion photography as different because it is commercial, perhaps it is rather a good example of the need to contrive in all photography. Looking at fashion photographs we wonder to what extent other, apparently spontaneous, photographs were contrived. The idea that fashion photography represents a debasement of the medium must be challenged at a time when … Read more
