Fashion Photography

Fashion photography today is as much about ideas as about image. Nowadays, both of these inform our notions of style and identity. Globalisation, and developments in Information Technology, combining hand in hand with advances in textiles and manufacturing, at all levels, means that trends and fashions are formed more quickly than ever before. The pace of change in fashion, necessary to its economic survival,is accelerating. To keep abreast of these changes, photographers of fashion that are working on the cutting edge, need to quickly assimilate avant-garde currents, stylistic markers, and the pulse of the zeitgeist into their work. This makes Fashion Photography a dynamic contemporary medium which cross pollinates with music, art, fashion, design, as well as social politics, thereby making its practitioners important and influential pilots in an industry propelled by publicity. Although there are still ordinary descriptive fashion photographs glamourising the garments in order to shift units, the type of photography required by the most aspirational or cool magazines, and designers, for their advertising, more often looks at first glance like fine art or reportage. They may be a digital fantasy or an issue based analogue or vice versa. The point is that firstly they have to catch your eye.

These pictures are the result of collaboration, usually between an editor, a stylist, and the photographer. Make up and art direction aid and abet the fiction created. And it is all contrivance, even if stylistically we are striving for realism or unvarnished notions of beauty. Fashion Photography currently seems to exist in a bi-polar vacuum between so called grunge and glamour, AKA reality and make believe. On the one hand grunge or trash is a type of reaction to the unreasonable possibilities of slick perfection and the politics of beauty, and on the other hand, in the past decade, advances in the digital image manipulation field have led to the increase in notions of fantasy and abstraction. As fashion and style magazines and their advertising correspondents proliferate in a seemingly chaotic space, where is the Fashion Photograph at? Are its practitioners artists or technicians? Is it culturally significant or is it just to flog gear?