Fashion Photography Research Articles

Tarrying with the elephant: Queer villainy and aesthetic pleasure in Steven Klein’s photography

Through a close reference to Steven Klein’s photo spread ‘John Robinson’ for L’Uomo Vogue in 2003, this article tracks the appearance of the fictional character of the queer villain in fashion editorial photography. It discusses specifically how the register of ‘affectlessness’ is embodied and aesthetically performed by the queer villain. Affectlessness is contextualized within the repertoire of neutral affects that were circulated in fashion photography in the late 1990s and early 2000s as an aesthetic stance that counteracted the normative depictions of ‘happy feelings’ in commercial imagery as well as normative styles of masculinity. Affective states of sadness, alienation and neutrality were enacted beginning in the 1990s primarily by androgynous and sexually ambivalent figures: the stylized representation of such states signalled a challenge to binary ways of embodying and performing masculinity and femininity. After a critical reading of ‘John Robinson’, the article concludes by tracing a speculative trajectory for thinking about aesthetic pleasure in relation to queer amoral characters in fashion visual narratives.

Perancangan Buku Fotografi Fashion Batik Jawa Timur Sebagai Upaya Meningkatkan Citra Budaya

Perancangan buku fotografi fashion ini bertujuan untuk mengenalkan kepada masyarakat khususnya para generasi muda agar lebih mengenal dan menyukai gaya fashion khususnya busana batik Jawa Timur. Buku fotografi fashion ini dibuat untuk menampilkan beberapa busana batik Jawa Timur yang sudah sangat berkembang dan menginformasikan tentang motif atau corak batik kepada masyarakat agar dapat mengetahui tentang asal usul batik Jawa Timur. Adanya buku fotografi fashion batik Jawa Timur dapat meningkatkan ketertarikan masyarakat untuk menggunakan busana batik asli Jawa Timur. Buku fotografi fashion ini menggunakan dua sumber data yaitu primer dan sekunder, pengumpulan data melalui wawancara dengan beberapa narasumber dan observasi melalui beberapa buku, menggunakan kerangka perancangan modifikasi milik Sanyoto. Hasil akhir dari perancangan ini adalah dihasilkannya media informasi berupa buku fotografi fashion bagi masyarakat tentang batik Jawa Timur, dapat memberikan edukasi tentang batik Jawa Timur dan meningkatkan minat masyarakat dalam menggunakan busana batik daerah Jawa Timur.

Eccentric Feelings: Little Girls’ Pleasures on the Feminist Fashion Set

ABSTRACT In the face of commercial fashion photography's contribution to the shaping of the gendered public fantasy of the child, this article quarries, through a perspective shaped by queer affect theory, the kinds of figurations that in independent fashion magazines have stimulated alternative ways of thinking and feeling in relation to children. The case study, or scene, through which this analysis is conducted is ‘Juweeltje,’ a fashion editorial spread shot by feminist photographer Cornelie Tollens for Dutch magazine in 1995. In the midst of a controversial period dominated by collective media anxiety and moral panic around child pornography, and underpinned by conservative sentimentalising efforts to safeguard the Child, Dutch, an independent fashion magazine published between 1994 and 2002, grappled with such discourses by forging a visual trajectory for rethinking childhood through a queer affective prism. This article ultimately seeks to animate discussions around queer childhood and expand the current affective taxonomies associated with the child by unearthing the rich affective scenarios enacted by feminist fashion photography.

수잔 손택의 캠프 관점에서 팀 워커의 패션사진에 관한 연구

This study looked at the characteristics and significance of modern fashion trends through the fashion photos of photographer Tim Walker from the perspective of Susan Sontag's Camp, the representative keyword proposed by the Metropolitan Museum in 2019 and Met Gala. The objectives of the study are as follows. First, research methodologies are sought through the theoretical consideration of Susan Sontag's camp and Tim Walker's fashion photography. Second, it defines the main meaning of the camp in fashion, and types the fashion photos of the team walkers accordingly. Third, derive the characteristics of team walker fashion photography from the camp's perspective. The results of the study showed that, first, Susan Sontag's camp was a research point of view and reasonable application to methodologies that understood the trend of contemporary fashion. Second, Tim Walker's fashion photos could be categorized into the camp's artificial, neutral and humorous. Third, from the point of view of Susan Sontag's camp, Tim Walker's fashion photos were derived from the characteristics of surreal storytelling, neutral and lightness. From a research perspective to understand the various trends that appear in modern fashion, the conclusions drawn through the study of fashion photography as Susan Sontag's camp and expression medium of fashion could be used as the basis for related follow-up research as artificial- surreal storytelling, neutral-neutral, humorist-light.

데이비드 라샤펠 패션 사진에 나타난 여성의 성적 이미지 연구

본 연구는 선행연구 분석을 통해 패션 사진에 나타난 성적 표현 유형을 살펴보고 이를 바탕으로 데이비드 라샤펠의 패션 사진에 나타난 여성의 성적 이미지를 분석하여 이에 나타난 내적 의미를 밝히고자 함에 연구 의 목적이 있다. 본 연구의 내용은 다음과 같다. 첫째, 패션 사진의 개념과 선행연구를 통해 패션 사진에서의 여성의 성적 이미지 표현 유형을 정립한다. 둘째, 이론적 고찰을 토대로 데이비드 라샤펠의 패션 사진에 나타 난 여성의 성적 이미지 표현 유형을 살펴본다. 셋째, 앞서 분류된 표현 유형에 나타난 내적 의미를 도출한다. 연구의 방법으로는 패션 사진에 대한 문헌 연구와 사진집에 나타난 패션을 매개로 하는 패션 사진 중 여성 신체의 이미지가 잘 표현된 사례를 선별하여 연구하였다. 연구의 결과는 다음과 같다. 데이비드 라샤펠의 패션 사진에 나타난 여성의 성적 이미지 표현 유형으로는 성행위의 직접적 묘사와 집단 성행위, 수간 등을 노골적으로 표현한 직설적 표현, 다른 물체를 통해 성기, 정액 등을 상징적으로 묘사하거나 제3의 상황을 연출함으로써 성적인 상상력을 자극하는 상징적인 표현, 여성의 신체를 우스꽝스럽게 표현하거나 여성과 남 성의 신체를 결합하여 표현한 왜곡적 표현으로 나타났다. 이러한 표현 유형에 따른 내적 의미는 첫째, 다면화 된 여성의 성 역할 표현이다. 둘째, 여성의 독립적이고 주체적인 성 욕망의 표현이다. 셋째, 남성 중심적 사회 에 대한 비판이다. 넷째, 플라스틱 섹슈얼리티의 표현으로 도출되었다. 패션 사진을 대표하는 작가로서 자신 만의 독특한 관점으로 여성의 신체를 대담하게 표현한 데이비드 라샤펠의 패션 사진을 통해 여성의 성적 이미지를 분석하는 것은 의미 있는 연구라 사료된다. 본 연구의 결과가 여성의 다면성과 주체성을 표현하고 자 하는 패션 이미지 생산자들에게 방향을 제시하고, 현대 패션 사진작가가 표현한 여성의 성적 이미지에 관한 사례 연구로써 후속 연구에 활용되길 기대해 본다.

VISUAL WOMEN COMMUNICATION CAREER IN PHOTO FASHION

This study aims to determine the how visual communication of career women in fashion photos on Instagram. This research is a qualitative descriptive study using data collection and analysis techniques through observation, interviews, and documentation. Presentation of data involves various steps to organize and process data a career woman (subject) in a fashion photo on instagram social media, so as all the data is analyzed thoroughly involved in a single unit. The existence of shared photos by the women's career in media instagram is a real form of visual communication from them and have specific purposes. Research results show that from several photos of women fashion career researchers set as the data to be analyzed by Researchers there are different meanings in each of the photo, but Researchers assume that this is a career woman Local Brand who is able to show themessages separate from each photo fashion up to date in their instagram social media.

Cover Image

I’m a freelance digital designer working out of Saskatoon.SK. On a daily basis, I design anything from Facebook posts to billboards. Currently, I’m going into my 3rd year at Edwards School of Business. You can learn more and view my portfolio at balrajmahil.xyz. The original photo was taken by Aiony Haust, a fashion photographer working worldwide. The inspiration for the cover comes from the artist Magdiel Lopez.

Visual seduction: Eroticism in surrealistic art photography and postmodern fashion photography

Surrealistic art photography reveals eroticism and nudity as something that both fascinates and agitates, compelling the audience to pay attention, willingly or reluctantly. Undoubtedly, for surrealistic artists the sphere of fantasy and sexual sensation emerge as a source of pleasure and aesthetic sensation. Surrealistic fantasies, dreams and human sexuality have merged with elements of art and porn culture to create hybrid visual forms and postmodern fashion photography is certainly among them. Unlike surrealistic art photography that serves as an emancipatory tactic or as a transgressive act of provoking the public, postmodern fashion photography utilizes eroticism as an expression or vestige of perverse enjoyment. Perversion in the eroticized postmodern context holds somewhat particular meaning. Desire is operationalized without restrictions, appears everywhere while losing its imaginary. Hence, visual seduction is a never-ending game between seducers and the seduced. In light of a growing interest in understanding photography, and visual culture, this article examines how eroticism is constructed through surrealistic photographed content, and it explores the implication of this for further study of postmodern fashion photography. Conceptually, and methodologically, this article draws on semiotics (Roland Barthes), and discursive analysis, including psychoanalytic (Sigmund Freud), and representational theory and practice (Laura Mulvey, Stuart Hall and Jean Baudrillard).

Kitchen sink erotica: Working-class lads, nudity, aspiration and spectatorship in modern British culture and fashion photography

This article examines the subject and visual representation of the English working-class lad as both an identification figure for young, modern-day fashion aficionados and a fantasy figure to a predominantly gay audience. It pays special attention to the character’s clothed and naked body, and its performance down the runway; in recent fashion editorials and British-made gay porn. The article investigates how mostly male British artists view and promote working-class male imagery and specifically how fashion photography of the past two decades frames, produces and articulates stories about social class and class difference in the context of masculinity and nudity, and what do these stories tell us about contemporary models of success, failure, struggle and aspiration in multiracial, present day Britain. By linking the current fashion industry’s fascination with working-class imagery with a similar cultural trend in 1960s Britain, the research aims to establish that today’s fashion image makers share similar tendencies with British Social Realist writers and filmmakers in romanticizing the working class, while sticking to a similar, fabricated aesthetic. This enduring fascination for working-class heroes and all things ‘street’ could become problematic when contextualized with industries and commercial ventures such as fashion, and the promotion of clothing and advertising.

Where no Woman has Gone Before: Femininity, Fashion Photography, and the Race for Space

With the Soviet launch of Sputnik in 1957, the Cold War “race for space” officially began, and in the United States discussions arose concerning women’s role in helping meet the increased need for specialists in science and technology, including whether or not they should be trained as astronauts. These debates often revolved around femininity, a construct that at the time was rarely associated with scientific or technological intellect. Cold War anxiety over American femininity also manifested in visual culture. In this article, I focus specifically on fashion layouts from Vogue and Harper’s Bazaar featuring photographs by Richard Avedon, William Klein, and Bruce Davidson, arguing that in the early 1960s, space age apparatus and motifs were juxtaposed with ultra-feminine fashion models, which was symptomatic of how the possibility of women’s involvement with space exploration was being channeled into the socially sanctioned realm of feminine consumption.

Review: Flintstone Modernism, or The Crisis in Postwar American Culture, by Jeffrey Lieber

Jeffrey Lieber Flintstone Modernism, or The Crisis in Postwar American Culture Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 2018, 296 pp., 21 color and 19 b/w illus. $34.95 (cloth), ISBN 9780262037495 Anxiety stimulates creativity. In his new book Flintstone Modernism , Jeffrey Lieber explains how mid-twentieth-century anxiety over a perceived cultural crisis shaped modernist architecture in the United States. Lieber ingeniously relates buildings to fashion photography, advertising, and Hollywood's “sword-and-sandal” epics about the ancient world. He draws upon all of these to analyze International Style structures and the more decorative, historicist buildings of the late 1950s and early 1960s by Eero Saarinen, Edward Durrell Stone, and others. Until recently, these works—the latter in particular—were often dismissed or castigated as retreats from modernism's core values and aesthetics, or as more troubling symptoms of a larger cultural crisis. Lieber frames his narrative with Hannah Arendt's warning about the perceived cultural crisis in her 1958 book The Human Condition .1 Arendt deplored the rise of a technology-obsessed society that masked its totalitarian tendencies with a thin veneer of humanism, resulting in a debased “mass culture.” Lieber asks, “What are some expressions of the crisis in culture?” (2). He finds the answers in buildings, movies, and other related media, though he is not fully clear about the contradiction at the heart of his project. What Arendt saw as expressions of the cultural crisis were actually the solutions offered by government, business, and media to the same problem she saw. Like Arendt, many in these sectors believed their culture was in crisis. To help solve the dilemma, they formulated an architecture that crossed modernism with ancient-world precedents, calling it a new humanism (a goal of many postwar architecture cultures). For example, Rome's Colosseum inspired Stone's United States Pavilion for the 1958 Brussels World's Fair. Such enthusiasm for the ancient world extended far beyond architecture: Cecil B. DeMille's 1956 film The Ten Commandments , for instance, told a …

Model for art effect evaluation of fashion photography with triangular intuitionistic fuzzy information

Model for art effect evaluation of fashion photography with triangular intuitionistic fuzzy information

Pin Up Style dalam Fotografi Fashion Kontemporer

Fashion becomes a social symbol that gives the cultural identity to a person. Pin up style has existed since the late 1950s. This style which is a combination of urban style and pop culture is identical with a light, tight, and semi-open dress. The image sticking on pin up style fashion makes the women called as "teasing ladies". The chosen genre is contemporary fashion photography that is a genre in photography which aims to show the clothes and other fashion items influenced by the impact of modernization.The result of this final assignment project is a series of fashion photography which uses the fashion style of 1950s that is pin up style. In every visualization of the creation of this photographic work, it aims to present the story based on the ideas and the concepts as well as to introduce the type of pin up style for each photograph. The background, the property, the make up, the hair style, as well as the surrounding objects are used to support the story in the resulted photographs. Keywords: pin up style, fashion, contemporary fashion photography

Like Water & Oil? Fashion photography as journalistic comment

In its August issue 2010, Vogue Italia ran a 24-page fashion editorial by photographer Steven Meisel. Entitled ‘Water & Oil’, it was inspired by the Deepwater Horizon oil disaster in the Gulf of Mexico that began in April that year. The shoot caused an uproar in both new and old media. Across the journalistic coverage of the shoot and the attendant commentary from digital readers and bloggers was an underlying sentiment that a boundary had been crossed, that high fashion photography had no right to use environmental catastrophe as a backdrop for the promotion of fashion. Much of the online commentary echoed Angela McRobbie’s argument, that fashion media (and especially Vogue) can only conceive of political reality as ‘gestures of style … they can never take the form of social analysis’. This essay poses two questions: can fashion photography sometimes perform the usually journalistic work of cultural and political comment? And how can we understand the resistance to such a function, especially in a commercial women’s magazine like Vogue? Sitting at the intersection of cultural studies and journalism studies, it will draw on the work of John Hartley to answer these questions. Laying out the discourse surrounding the controversial photo spread, this essay explains how the images created by Meisel are ‘matter out of place’. They provoke us to re-evaluate what journalism is and who is allowed to perform it.

“When Boys Looked Like Girls and Girls Looked Like Boys”: Interferences in the Music and Fashion World of the British 1980s – The Case of the New Romantics and their Contemporary Echoes

The creativity of fashion and the music world often relies on transfers and collaborations in which fashion designers and music celebrities interact to feature a common project. In Britain, New Romanticism was one of the 1980s musical movements most characterised by eccentric fashion experiments that were entirely part of the artistic performance and addressed cross-dressing issues. Documenting the gender-bending club youth and stars of the London underground scene, Derek Ridgers, Graham Smith or Anita Corbin have showed how fashion challenged normative dress codes and introduced a form of social disruption through the use of clothing. Magazines such as i-D questioned the hybrid style of documentary and fashion photography which shaped British identity and is still at work today. This paper explores the endless possibilities of the crossovers often found in music and fashion photography, focusing on the rejection of a simplistic reduction of gender to male and female opposites.

패션 사진에 나타난 미러 대칭의 표현 특징과 미적 특성

패션 사진에 나타난 미러 대칭의 표현 특징과 미적 특성

How Fashion Travels: The Fashionable Ideal in the Age of Instagram

Despite the many transformations in aesthetics and technologies that fashion photography has undergone since its spread as an influential cultural form in the early twentieth century, one constant has always held fast: that the imagery depicts a fashionable ideal. The look of the fashionable ideal is, of course, ever subject to change. However, there are qualities that are always present: the body is subject to the authority of fashion, limitations to the autonomy of the body such as gravity or ageing are absent, and the figure is imbued with possibility and mutability, even as it freezes a momentary state of perfection.These qualities become particularly marked in the present era, in which digital influencers simultaneously assume the roles of cultural producer, model and consumer while implicitly embodying the fashionable ideal. At the moment of their publication, the labor of producing these images seems to evaporate, as bodies with no material limitation are presented with immediacy, and figure, commodity and surrounds collapse into one.This article interrogates how we can conceive of the labor of appearance and being in the fashion image, and considers how this style of fashion imagery draws on visual rhetoric of prior eras of fashion photography and is structured by the existing power relations of capitalism and the human and non-human actors of media technologies. In so doing, the concept of the fashionable ideal is explored in one of its contemporary iterations as fluid, aspirational, global, simultaneously embodied and disembodied.

Orientalist reveries: The imaginary creative constructions of the Moroccan space and place by the figures of the non-Muslim male traveller and female tourist − from travel literature to photography and contemporary fashion imagery

Abstract In this body of research and original photographic work to which it responds, I examine the position and connotation of Morocco as a site for artistic inspiration in travel literature, photography and fashion photography in the context of three main themes relating to its imaginary constructions: Orientalism; the western male traveller in contradistinction to the female tourist; and the figure of the cultured flâneur. These themes became associated with European industrialization and imperialism towards the end of the nineteenth century, and the research draws links between this particular period of culture and its values, and our present day, romantic fascination with Morocco, and the revival of such themes and their popular reincarnation in contemporary fashion editorials. The article investigates the role that photography has played in the development of twenty-first century Orientalism and its manifestation in visual fashion storytelling, and the interplay between artist-subject-location: how does the western traveller/photographer view both himself and others in the process of picturing the Maghreb and what are the kinds of relationships and tensions that develop between the traveller/photographer and the North African sites that he observes? The research focuses on the long association between travel and sexual adventure and explores the literary and visual narratives involving the figures of the contemporary traveller and tourist in the North African space and place, and how adventurer and location feed off one another. By examining the appropriation of such figures and motifs from art and literature into contemporary photography of travel and fashion photography, the article aims to consider the visual representation and specific propositions of locations such as Tangier, Marrakesh, Assilah and the Moroccan Sahara as chaotic, dangerous and alien, and understand the complex, post-Orientalist rendition of the North African space and visual culture within the context of fashion photography. More specifically this article poses the following questions: why does our western culture want or need to revisit condescending Orientalist fantasies and an imperialist mode of representation? And in what way are the tropes of Orientalist representation tied to the fantasies, desires and anxieties that the fashion industry and its consumer engage with? The article takes Morocco’s strong ties with western cultural figures as its starting point, and in times of intense political and social unrest in the Arab world – the continuing fascination with and promotion of this Muslim country as a sensual tourist destination by fashion editorial and ad campaign shoots. The article considers two photography monographs by western male travellers/photographers shooting photographic bodies of work in a foreign Islamic country: Paul Bowles’ How Could I Send a Picture into the Desert (Bowles and Bischoff 1994) and Harry Gruyaert’s Morocco (1990), in addition to several case studies from literature (Peter Mayne, Elias Canetti); photography (Irving Penn, Daido Moriyama); and contemporary fashion editorial work (William Klein, Jack Pierson, Azim Haidaryan, Inez Van Lamsweerde/Vinoodh Matadin, Mario Testino, Hans Feurer, Steven Meisel and Daniel Riera). It aims to establish links between the visual representation of travel and the context of gender, fashion, identity and sexuality and the psychological dimension of tourism.

The Phantasmagoric World of Thierry Mugler

This review of Thierry Mugler: Couturissime approaches the exhibition through a feminist art-historical lens and attends to the various ways that both Mugler’s clothing and the Montreal Museum of Fine Arts’ curatorial team has framed and constructed the powerful, threatening woman as a complex figure who is hard, cold, sensual, strong, hard-working, and spectacular, among many other valences. The exhibition, which had its world premiere at the MMFA in March 2019, is organized as a fashion opera in six acts, and each room illuminates disparate yet interconnected parts of Mugler’s body of work: his costumes for a 1985 performance of Macbeth in Paris; the decadent and excessive clothing worn and worshipped by past and present celebrities; the black-and-white power dressing that Helmut Newton and others have canonized in fashion photography; the astounding creations inspired by insects and reptiles; and finally, the cyborgian fembots that have been presented in both Vogue and music videos. The inclusion of photographs and videos — not a new strategy in blockbuster fashion exhibitions — is essential to the success of Thierry Mugler: Couturissime, as they reveal that while these clothes are works of art, they were made to be worn and mobilized. Although not explicitly a feminist exhibition, for viewers who are looking for feminist, political inspiration wherever they can find it Mugler’s warrior women and formidable clothing — whether made of metal, latex or feathers — provide a powerful reminder that clothing is just one of the many weapons in our arsenal.

Midsommar i sagolandet: Bildretorik och rörelse

When watching the world around us we are not neutral, but co-creating. Seeing a photograph in an everyday context is not just a matter of taking in sensory data, but of making meaning based on what we think we know about the world. The insight that the gaze is not neutral has political implications because it implies that the meaning of what is watched is not given. In the power game about the gaze, the question of whose gaze gets to be primary becomes central. The gaze is embodied and dependent on memory to become rhetorically effective. These dynamics and their subversive implications are illustrated in this article by a reading of a fashion photography from a German women’s magazine. In the context of a special issue on holidaying in Sweden, a small party of people is posing in a presumably Swedish scenery dressed in traditional German clothes. By highlighting the polysemy of this immediately inconspicuous photo, attention is drawn to factors that tend to be overlooked in a rational and argumentative approach to visual rhetoric