Lecture notes from October 1, 2007
Anette Göthlund is a professor in visual-pedagogy. She is interested in picture-use, gender-issues, teenager-girl identity. When we talk about fashion photography we must remember also art-history and iconography and the fact that when talking about fashion we do not talk only about dress, but also the body.
- fashion photography as communication
- visuals of one day
- cornerstone for semiology
- visual culture studies
- commodification of women
Visual material can be studied in many ways. Culture studies do that from a critical perspective, as well feminist studies. Visuals hide the constructed power. They can construct anything - gender, nationality, sexuality, ethnicity, identity... you name it. Fashion and identity are always represented in close relation to each other. One field fashion researchers deal with is fashion as a picture. They ask, what does a photograph say? What do say different types of fashion photographs when placed into another, totally different context? From their point of view clothes and bodies are tools for visual communication. Besides, fashion photography surrounds us daily, it's practically everywhere we go. Or even, not go. There are some basic differences between fashion photos and advertisements. But a fashion photo can also be a commercial photo and vice versa. From the history it is known that former fashion illustrators became fashion photographers when technology had progressed enough.
Sisley was one of the first fashion companies who started to experiment with fashion photography in the net. They also started with what now is called 'fashion pornography', they were the innovators in fashion photography.
In the 1990's fashion photos were still, but that's what they are not any more. During the last decade the catalogue-fashion-business created the image that fashion is the most important commodity, that one must buy clothes, no matter what. Today's fashion photos do not represent so much clothes any more, but the mood, the color, the shape maybe. Photographs are often just dark images of something that remainds us of a dress, but we cannot actually see the dress. They do not say that clothes are the most important elements on the photo. But still, photos are full of meaning that say a lot more than one dress; they speak about ideals; ideal family, ideal personality, perfect body.
So the body embraces figure, form of a body, feminine body, the deformation of body. We have types of bodies came up during last two decades - "heroine chic". See more "Face of fashion" by Jennifer Craik, 1994.
And not to save fashion from critique - fashion and fashion photography are a lot, lot to do how 'real' women are made.
According to gaze-theory, the feminist woman is the spectacle of a woman. What is it to be a woman? To control the body and to have power over women. The body can be fashionable or fashion-able, moreover the body is fashion-able or not. The clothes are an expression of self, bodies represent sexuality. In every single case.
Many theorists say that female body is formed to satisfy male-gaze. But there is also this "come-on-look" that is considered to be masculine. So where one image speaks to us, the picture itself calls to see it. Where images are sometimes artificial and constructed, they still represent some kind of a reality, they are not just fantasies, they are moments saved on that very moment they were taken and that is how things looked like, even if they were constructed to look like that.
Annette brings an example of the famous YSL Opium Fragrance ad from 2001 which is the representation of auto-erotica where Sophie Dahl is touching herself. We can also imagine Goya's work and syrrealism that has provided interesting topic for researchers in semiology and psychoanalysis (Freud). People look at the images in different ways, they also understand them differently. The new sessions of spring or fall collections do not represent so much spring or fall, but the mood, the art, the new stuff that has become into the mind of an artist - the photographer or designer. It's just a composition. Although people see and read images that tell stories, the choice is theirs. They can take these images as pictures that are produced by a company that wants to sell clothes, or by a magazine who wants to tell a story. It is the world of images.
To think further
- fashion photography without clothes?
- how do we use pictures in our everyday lives?
- how the power uses the image or how image uses the power?
- look at an image, by what you can say that there is a wo/man; what are the characteristics of gender when not seeing the full body, but some parts of it?
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