Fashion Photography Research Articles

Queering Glamour in Interwar Fashion Photography

Obviously, glamour is queer. But has this always been true? This article offers queer histories of capitalism and interwar glamour through an analysis of George Platt Lynes's photographic work. Lynes, an American photographer for Condé Nast publications, was one of numerous queer photographers, including Baron de Meyer, Cecil Beaton, George Hoyningen-Huene, and Horst P. Horst, who defined a queer aesthetics of fashion photography in New York, Paris, London, and Hollywood in the years before World War II. I historicize what Lynes called the “amorous regard” of his fashion photography through an analysis of his male nudes and the sexual history for which they are a visual record. In this article, I show how both Lynes's fashion images and his male nudes emerged from a market-imbricated queer kinship network to produce a discourse of interwar glamour that accommodated both dominant readings of heteronormativity and resistant readings of queer, white, belonging.

Between Image and Spectator: Reception Studies as Visual Methodology

This article makes the case for reception studies as a useful tool in the visual analysis of fashion photography. While there has been increased attention paid to methodology in the field of Fashion Studies of late, the study of audience reception—that is, the way viewers make sense of images—remains underdeveloped. This article lays down an experimental methodology for reception studies of fashion media, using the focus group format as sociological method and “discursive performativity” as theoretical framework. It presents a critical appraisal of this method, drawing upon the findings of research on the “woman-child” in European fashion magazines, from 1990 to 2015. In so doing, the study engages with debates on the “female gaze,” the active audience, polysemy and the “effects” of fashion magazines.

Fashion and Air Travel: Australian Photography and Style

The expansion of commercial air travel in Australia after the Second World War caused significant changes to women's fashion and its marketing in this country. The developing technology of aeroplanes as commercial carriers meant European clothes and ideas reached Australia increasingly rapidly. A long-term sense of stylistic inferiority diminished and the sometimes unquestioning acceptance of imported style was challenged. As post-war retailers expanded their product range, they sought possibilities to market Australian designed and made garments both in Europe and the US. Using co-marketing with the airline industry in particular, retailers began to foster a new confidence amongst middle-class women that by wearing local attire they could participate in a worldwide network of stylish production and consumption. For a brief period, Australian, US and European-made fashions were in serious competition. This article suggests promotional images featuring the connectivity between the technology of air transport and fashion after the Second World War mark a discrete moment in the representation of women in this country as mature and stylishly dressed global travellers, prior to a vigorously emerging youth market by the mid-1960s. It also posits the idea that, although representational stereotypes of Australian women as homemakers remained intact, the use of technological settings of airline travel in fashion photography created a new and cosmopolitan narrative that ran counter to the ideal of domesticity.

Dreaming in Indian: Contemporary Native American Voices, ed. by L. Charleyboy & M. Leatherdale

Charleyboy, Lisa, and Mary Leatherdale, editors. Dreaming in Indian: Contemporary Native American Voices. Annick Press, 2016.This magazine-like anthology for young adults presents a plurality of contemporary Native American voices, using beautiful design and high quality photographic layouts. The forms of expression these voices take are varied, and include poetry, art, memoir, hip-hop lyrics, question and answer interviews, fiction pieces, and fashion photography, among others. Over fifty pieces are featured, from well-known Native American artists from across North America, such as throat singer Tanya Tagaq Gillis, author Joseph Boyden, and actress Michelle Thrush, although many other voices are represented too, including those of chefs, youths, fashion designers, journalists, and more. Native American Nations from all over North America are represented, including Blackfoot, Cree, Blood, Metis, and mixed race. Short biographies on each contributor are featured at the end of the book. Although Dreaming in Indian is meant for young adults, it will appeal to a broad spectrum of the population, including children and adults.Dreaming in Indian is presented in four different sections: ‘Roots,’ ‘Battles,’ ‘Medicines,’ and ‘Dreamcatchers’. ‘Roots’ covers pieces related to ideas of home and the past, ‘Battles’ examines issues such as racism, gender identity, abuse, addiction, and poverty, ‘Medicines’ shows the innovative ways youth have found healing in music, art, sports, and cultural traditions such as jingle dancing and hoop dancing, and ‘Dreamcatcher’ looks towards how Native people are currently shaping the future for Native youth. Topics covered within these sections also include bullying, the effects of residential schools, and suicide, but also extend to feeling like an outsider both within and outside of your culture, career advice, how culture must grow, and reactions to stereotypical portrayals of Native Americans in popular culture. In addressing these issues, Dreaming in Indian offers glimpses and directions for how to move forward without patronizing or becoming removed from the topic. Even more powerful are the multiple viewpoints that are brought to the same issue. Different Native voices often offer differing thoughts on the same topic, illustrating how myriad and complex the people and these issues are.Ultimately, Dreaming in Indian is a powerful book that provides a well realized portrayal of Native people by Native people. As a non-fiction work, it fills a niche not often addressed, and showcases the talent and passion of the people it engages. The book can be read in a couple of hours, but due to its rich content and the fantastically detailed visuals, it is the kind of work that one returns to multiple times, and that stays with the reader long after it is finished. This book will appeal not only to those of Native descent, but to anyone who has sought to connect to their own identity, and to other human beings.Highly Recommended: 4 out of 4Reviewer: Colette LeungColette Leung is a graduate student at the University of Alberta, working in the fields of Library and Information science and Humanities Computing who loves reading, cats, and tea. Her research interests focus around how digital tools can be used to explore fields such as literature, language, and history in new and innovative ways.

Aesthetics of fashion photographs: Effect on user preferences

Aesthetics of fashion photographs: Effect on user preferences

Images of Images: Notes on Anne Collier’s and Kotama Bouabane’s photo practices

Photography, since its very beginning, has been self-reflexive, with photos and cameras themselves becoming subject matter for further forays into imagemaking. Recent works by Anne Collier (b. Los Angeles, lives in New York) and Kotama Bouabane (b. Pakse, Laos; lives in Toronto) recall this history while making visible the ways in which culture and gender are appropriated and commodified within photography. particular, Collier and Bouabane make visual inquiries into the dissemination ubiquitous photographic instruments marketing, production, and ultimately consumerism. Through the construction, circulation, and recontextualization photographic advertisements and manuals, both artists challenge the ways in which we see and consume various media. Although they have very different approaches to image production, both photographers address subjects germane to the world photography while simultaneously questioning cliches and tropes within that sphere. (1) Collier's series Woman With A Camera (2006-present) depicts, as the title suggests, photographic ephemera in which various women are positioned with an assortment lens-based apparatuses. Woman With Cameras #1 and #2 (both 2012) introduces a headless, sprawling female nude whose anatomy is peppered by Contax, Olympus, Pentax, and Bronica cameras. Her body stretches over a full magazine spread and is truncated by the fold the spine with the foregrounded cameras intimately hovering over her reclining figure. This kind tropic depiction reappears in Zoom, 1978 (printed 2009), which likewise features a headless, lounging female clothed in nothing more than thigh-high stockings and gold high heels. Here, however, the female subject is bionic, as a large camera is propped on top her neck. With one hand she adjusts her Cyclops-like oculus and with the other she seems at the ready to release the shutter, as if to say she is recording us as much as we are visually consuming her. The same exchange between subject and viewer is rendered by Woman With A Camera (Postcard. Verso Recto) (2013). A mostly nude female adorned by an assortment shell and beaded jewelry leans slightly to the right as she points her camera at something or someone out the viewer's sightline. Coillier has paired the National Geographic-like postcard image with an image its blank recto. Written across the barrier that demarcates the typical postcard spaces used for addresses and messages is the caption A. Real Photograph. The postcard also tells us that this image, tided Say Cheese before I click. (Turkana Girl), is from the Edition East Africa, 1312. Rather than doctoring, cropping, or altering these images, Collier simply re-documents readily available materials. Shot against stark, white backgrounds, the magazines, postcards, advertisements, and other objects that appear in the Woman With A Camera series are shown as is. This directness should not be confused with neutrality. In these and others their type, Collier has mined a rich vein irony in which women's bodies and phallic cameras become intertwined in a misogynist system that is as consistent as it is extensive. (2) While several works in the series might challenge the cliche passive female subjects as consumable objects, these images still seem to depict deeper photographic tensions. Woman with a Camera (diptych) (2006), for instance. pictures publicity stills from the 1978 thriller Eyes Laura Mars (directed by Irvin Kershner), in which a fashion photographer, played by Fave Dunaway, develops the ability to see through the eyes a killer, through the lens her camera. Despite this bizarre affliction, Dunaway, pictured with her Nikon camera in hand, could be seen, as curator Michael Darling has noted, as an image of female empowerment and agency or perhaps some kind reversal the male gaze. (3) Celebrities reappear elsewhere in Collier's series. Woman with A Camera (The Last Sitting, Bert Stern) (2009) documents a photograph Marilyn Monroe, also posed with her Nikon camera in hand, in what would be her last photo shoot. …

ファッションスタイルに対するファッションイメージ用語の適合性に関する一考察（第2報）

From the previous paper, many problems about a fashion image term were shown. In this paper, I investigated the difference in evaluation of the fashion image term by nationality. I compared with the thing the image term in which the fashion photograph of 40 in the image term of 11 was chosen by 98 young South Korean women by the young 109 Japanese woman. As a result, while over 60% of Japanese subjects chose the same image terms for eight photographs, South Korean subjects selected for only three photographs. It was found that there was variation in the selected image terms on images of fashion style among the South Korean subjects. It analyzed using Hayashi's quantification methods class III. Although both were classified into four principal components, they differed from those of Japanese subjects regarding the styles belonging to each principal component and interpretation.

패션사진에 표현된 일상적 특성 - 일반인 모델과 작업한 패션사진작가를 중심으로 -

패션사진에 표현된 일상적 특성 - 일반인 모델과 작업한 패션사진작가를 중심으로 -

From runway to platform: The creation of a digital fashion photography archive

In 2011, Bloomsbury Publishing Plc purchased a fashion photography archive with over 750,000 images from runway photographer Niall McInerney, with the aim of digitizing it for the educational market. The archive spans the period from the late 1970s through to 2000, before the rise of digital photography. It includes many rare images – backstage and street style as well as runway. Bloomsbury recently completed the three-and-a-half-year digitization project, and is in the process of indexing the images for digital deployment as part of Bloomsbury Fashion Central, which will also include the Berg Fashion Library and Fairchild Books content. This article looks at the drivers behind the purchase of the archive, the challenges it presented and the logic of partnerships with other possible content providers.

The Feminine Awkward: Graceless Bodies and the Performance of Femininity in Fashion Photographs

Recent fashion photography has been preoccupied with awkward and uncomfortable poses. In fact, awkwardness—a negative affect comprising emotional and bodily discomfort—is part of the history of fashion photography. The ‘feminine awkward’ is proposed here as a formal and critical idiom for unpacking the relations that exist between the model, the photographic frame, and the camera, and for considering the way that the image is experienced by the viewer. The meaning of awkward fashion photographs is not only communicated directly, through various signifying practices; it also arises out of deeper emotional and bodily responses that accompany signification. The feminine awkward emerges most openly into fashion images during periods when gender norms are most forcefully contested, interfering with the trajectories of desire to which fashion images typically give rise. Culturally, it is aligned with paradigm shifts in social attitudes: with changing expectations of how a feminine subject should look and she should act. Looking at fashion photographs through the optic of the feminine awkward opens up new ways of thinking about the way that fashion photography simultaneously participates in, and unsettles, the production of gendered bodies.

Fashion Photography and Photojournalism: Posing the Body in Vu

The first issue of the French photographic journal Vu (1928–1940) stated, in a manifesto of intent, that it would reflect: ‘le rythme précipité de la vie actuelle’. The director, Lucien Vogel, had begun his career working in fashion publications and his wife, Cosette de Brunhoff, was the first editor of French Vogue in 1920. Vogel and his wife were directly engaged in recording fashion styles for the magazine’s special editions. His stable of photographers included Kertész, Man Ray, Tabard, Saad, d’Ora and Krull. They produced innovative fashion shoots in response to the advances made in publishing and photography at the end of the 1920s. They experimented with montage techniques and explored the potential of the new lightweight cameras. The covers they created could include celebrities and students; the focus of their work ranged from haute couture to investigative journalism. This gave the work more edge in comparison with the more composed mis-en-scène produced at the time for Vogue . For example, the diversity of Kertész’s portfolio ranged from models at Longchamp (1929) to stylish students at the Sorbonne (1933), indicators of traditional glamour and street fashion. The choice of specific locations such as these encouraged more natural body movements which, together with faster shutter speeds, affected the recording of the pose.

Fashion in Ruins: Photography, Luxury and Dereliction in 1940s London

Using Cecil Beaton’s photographs of bombed London as a starting point, this essay examines fashion’s representation in 1940s London, during the Second World War and its immediate aftermath. It focuses on fashion’s paradoxical status during a time of austerity and loss. Beaton’s images highlight contrasts between luxury, escape and desire, and the effects of war on the urban landscape, and the city’s inhabitants. Photographed against the ruins of bomb-scarred London, couture takes on different connotations, and femininity, as expressed through dress, gesture and pose, is problematized. Tensions between space, place, body and dress during this period are rethought, and the existence of not just a “ruins gaze,” but also an “austerity gaze” is perceived in the ways fashion photography invokes art and history in its representations of the dressed body.

Who’s Zoomin’ Who?: The Eyes of Donyale Luna

The most iconic image that accompanied the 1996 publication of 20th Century Photography: Museum Ludwig, Cologne—and one that continues to intrigue scholars of black diasporic visual culture—was the German photographer Charlotte March’s black-and-white photograph Donyale Luna with Earrings (1966), shot for twen magazine. March’s subject—the African American fashion model and actress Donyale Luna (1945–79)—is of great historical significance, not only because Luna was the first internationally acclaimed black fashion model, but also because she had an especially arresting, black diasporic visage at a time of European American aesthetic hegemony in high fashion and limited opportunities for black visibility in the mass media. This article tracks the conceptualization of Charlotte March’s singular portrait of Donyale Luna, putting it in its broader historical context and, relatedly, as a pivotal image from a sequence of contiguous photographic statements and counterstatements by several of the leading fashion photographers from the Swinging Sixties. What this account points to is the often undertheorized role of race and gender in modern visual studies and, in particular, this picture’s implicit metanarrative of black female agency and civil rights–era cultural defiance. The social contract between the photographer and “the sitter” is also explored in this article, arguing that when the sitter is an imposing African American artist/performer/observer, the photographer—and by extension, the portrait’s audience—finds herself in the unique, deferential position of being in the sitter’s own metaphorical, critical purview.

Fashion Photography on Social Media: Insights from Hong Kong Fashion Image Producers

This study draws on fashion and culture theories to explore the influence of visual sharing culture on social media in fashion. The objective is to interpret the perceived creative values and the meanings of such cultural phenomenon from the perspective of fashion media industry in Hong Kong. In-depth interviews, in the exploratory semi-structured format, were adopted in which 20 fashion image producers in Hong Kong were interviewed regarding their increasing involvement in professional fashion image making and blogging. Among the 20 respondents, 12 respondents were younger generation of image producers with experience around 3 years, while 8 respondents have been in the industry for 15 years in average. The findings of this research indicated that the nature of visual oriented social media platform supports a new communication model between the new generation of fashion image producers and image audience. It is evident that there is a new trend for young fashion lovers to become successfully engaged in the industry as career bloggers who can create their styles and express their ideas through fashion imaging and sharing. On the other side, the professionalism and authenticity of the young generation of fashion bloggers are sometimes in questions. The finding is significant to further academic studies on the value of fashion visual communication on social media, and to business sectors, in which this study provides insight for young fashion lovers for career development.

Visual research methodologies, branding and magazine readerships

Purpose– The purpose of this paper is to explore how interior spaces can be differently represented across home magazines of different background and target audiences. And investigates how visual texts can differentiate a brand, increase brand loyalty and target different market segments.Design/methodology/approach– This paper draws on material for comparative analysis from three home magazines (Wallpaper,Ideal HomeandElle Decoration). It combines quantitative methods (content analysis) and qualitative methods (fieldwork observations).Findings– This research suggests thatWallpaperis not just a magazine, but it has expanded to become a brand with a well-recognized logo. Practitioners managed to create a strong brand through the creation of a magazine with a very distinctive style among its competitors that clearly address the elite.Research limitations/implications– This paper focused on the production of magazine features and representations of interior spaces. Further research could be conducted to explore how readers belonging to different economic, social and cultural groups “receive” and comprehend the home magazine features.Practical implications– The findings of this research could be used to analyse fashion photography in editorial, fashion advertising, fashion brand websites and social media, thereby assisting in the analysis of fashion photography and the relationship between fashion items, set design, styling of space, target audiences, branding and visual communication; exploring further how fashion photography can effectively target different market segments and enhance a fashion brand and its identity.Originality/value– The area of magazine features, photography, set design and styling of space has received limited attention from scholars. The method of analysing interior spaces/set design presented in this paper can be developed further to provide in depth analysis of window and in store display design and the use of display design and visual merchandising as a way to reflect the fashion brand identity, target-specific market segments, differentiate and gain competitive advantage.

현대 패션 사진에 나타난 유희성에 관한 연구

The aim of this study was to gain an understanding of the element playfulness in fashion photographs related to openness and multiple significance in contemporary art. A total of 105 fashion photographs from US and UK Vogue magazine editorials and advertisements for the last five years were selected for the study. The photographs were analyzed in two main categories - the contextual element of themes, and the elements of visual expression; composition, models, objects and editing technology. The element of playfulness in the photographs were found to be divided into themes of infantile fantasy, social satire and situational dissonance, and elements of visual expression were found to express image distortion, expansion, exaggeration, reduction, and optical illusions. A photography type termed as infantile fantasy and social satire have descriptive characteristics and usually deliver the message by using models and objects to present a certain situation or express social satirical viewpoint and reflective attitude by using objects and photographic skills. A photography type termed as situational dissonance is characterized by immediately understood expressions and usually clarify the message by using a photographic technology such as editing the printed image or expect the model to express an exaggerated poses and ridiculous expressions, causing an optical illusion. Visually expressed and composed scene using composition, models, objects and editing technology is a specific character of photograph and due to the advances in computer editing technology it has been able to express the various playfulness.

패션매거진 Vogue의 패션사진에 나타난 이미지 표현형식 및 모델 포즈의 활용유형 분석

패션매거진 Vogue의 패션사진에 나타난 이미지 표현형식 및 모델 포즈의 활용유형 분석

Clothes Co-Parsing Via Joint Image Segmentation and Labeling With Application to Clothing Retrieval

This paper aims at developing an integrated system for clothing co-parsing (CCP), in order to jointly parse a set of clothing images (unsegmented but annotated with tags) into semantic configurations. A novel data-driven system consisting of two phases of inference is proposed. The first phase, referred as “image cosegmentation,” iterates to extract consistent regions on images and jointly refines the regions over all images by employing the exemplar-SVM technique [1]. In the second phase (i.e., “region colabeling”), we construct a multiimage graphical model by taking the segmented regions as vertices, and incorporating several contexts of clothing configuration (e.g., item locations and mutual interactions). The joint label assignment can be solved using the efficient Graph Cuts algorithm. In addition to evaluate our framework on the Fashionista dataset [2], we construct a dataset called the SYSU-Clothes dataset consisting of 2098 high-resolution street fashion photos to demonstrate the performance of our system. We achieve 90.29%/88.23% segmentation accuracy and 65.52%/63.89% recognition rate on the Fashionista and the SYSU-Clothes datasets, respectively, which are superior compared with the previous methods. Furthermore, we apply our method on a challenging task, i.e., cross-domain clothing retrieval: given user photo depicting a clothing image, retrieving the same clothing items from online shopping stores based on the fine-grained parsing results.

From Science to Fashion: Photography and the Production of a Surrogate Colony in Weimar Germany

This article examines German colonial cultures in the post-World War I period following Germany’s loss of a colonial empire. Photography had long been embedded in both the practical and ideological production of empire, but after 1918 took on an especially significant role in constructing a ‘surrogate colony’ that kept the colonial idea alive in the absence of direct colonial rule. The dynamics of this surrogate colony are especially evident in the publications of the organised colonial movement. Drawing on these publications, I argue that the colonial movement produced a surrogate colony that was as much about the management of gendered and racialised German populations as it was about propagandising for a return to colonial rule. Photography played a key role in bringing together two areas that underlay this gendered and racialised dynamic: science and commercial culture. I thus begin by tracing the way in which photographic scientific cultures, in particular in the fields of medicine, anthropology, and racial science, shaped the contours of the surrogate colony. These scientific cultures emerged in an unstable relationship with mass commercial photographic cultures, with the article then turning to an exploration of ‘colonial fashion photography’. The foregrounding of clothing and bodies in this photography highlights the complex relationship between scientific and commercial photography, which is shown to be deeply implicated in the production of racialised and gendered forms of embodiment.

Creating aesthetic, institutional and symbolic boundaries in fashion photo shoots

Abstract This study proposes a ‘bottom-up’, micro-sociological analysis of cultural production. Drawing on detailed observations of fashion photo shoots and interviews with fashion professionals in the Netherlands, we analyse how the division between ‘high’ (editorial) and ‘low’ (commercial) culture is produced in the fashion field. Our ethnographic analysis complements structuralist or institutionalist approaches like Bourdieu’s field theory, that assume an almost mechanical reproduction of field structure. Combining insights from existing ethnographies of fashion photography, with interaction ritual theory, and symbolic interactionism, we looked at a unique instance of cultural co-creation – the fashion photo shoot – to investigate how field structure and social practice come together in ‘doing aesthetics’. A step-by-step analysis of the ‘ingredients’ of a photo shoot, from finance, props and set to the model’s poses and the photographer’s style shows how the symbolically charged boundary between high and low fashion is made in concrete, embodied interactions, where it manifests itself simultaneously as institutional divide, aesthetic system and symbolic boundary. People producing fashion images experience structures and institutions as practical, aesthetic or institutional constraints and routines that provide both a conceptual framework and room for negotiation. Thus, during aesthetic interactions, people reproduce and produce boundaries, standards and conventions.