Guy Bourdins Work for Charles Jourdan - Essay Example

Guy Bourdin’s Work for Charles Jourdan Figure Charles Jourdan advertisment by Guy Bourdin Fashion photography has assumed a major part of modern cultural interpretation and allows the average consumer a window into the world of inspiration that ceases to inspire artists. Bourdin arrives from a rich tradition in fashion photography. He was one of the first photographers to create a complex narrative to then catch a moment — sensual, provocative, shocking, exotic, and surrealistic. Bourdin’s taste for controversy and stylization as well as his formal daring and the narrative of his images exceeds the bounds of conventional advertising photography. Shattering expectations and questioning boundaries, he has set the stage for a new kind of fashion photography (Cotton & Verthime, 2003). This paper will look into one of Bourdin’s works for fashion photography by exploring the connotative and denotative aspects. Within the domain of fashion and its interpretation, denotation and connotation vary widely. While denotation expresses nothing more than a straight interpretation of the object, connotation attaches cultural or other such meaning to the work. The work presented above has both a denotative and various connotative aspects. In simple denotative terms, the image shown above depicts a female figure dressed up in red clothes and shoes. The figurine is shown as if walking but being obscured by the pole in front of her. While the denotative explanation for this image is deceptively simple, the connotative aspects are not. Bourdin is known for using certain visual narratives in his work. In the case of this work, these are the pole (often depicted as a pole, a tree, bollard, road sign and column in Bourdin’s work) and the wall (often depicted as a wall, a cliff face, wire barriers or as a wooden fence in Bourdin’s work). These motifs tend to recur in Bourdin’s work and signify his understanding of the world (McCabe, 2005). In terms of classic artistic convention, the pole is a protagonist and Bourdin presents himself here as the symbol of his act of interpreting nature and the passing of time. Bourdin is the storyteller, like a director in a theatre who is reconstructing narratives of his own imagination and, as ever, remains enigmatic. The wall serves as a barrier, it rises high, delineating the image plane and articulating the space. It creates a sense of threat – containment and frustration and hints towards untold mysteries. It inspires unease through both its formal and emotional tension. Bourdin recognized the conflation of space when he raised his camera to his eye. In contrast, the motif of the wall stretches horizontally across the planes of the Polaroid. This is a dramatic perspective, and creates a desire to see and to know what lies behind the impenetrable barrier of the wall. The viewer is suspended waiting for these scenes to be filled. The wall hides our view, flattens the plane, renders the space shallow, and reconstructs territories. Bourdin uses the picture space to create dramatic effect, rupturing the image with vertical and horizontal grids of common objects, creating a unique perspective in artistic and emotional terms (Gingeras, 2006). There is a concrete pole, a double-faced obelisk, in the centre of the foreground creating the perfect central focus for the image. The backdrop is Bourdins solid wall, made emphatically so by the cropping out of the sky and the horizon. Both the wall and the pole are linked by their texture and colour and serve to accentuate the compression of the picture planes. The pole obscures the torso of the redheaded, red-coated model. The model is compressed by Bourdins recurring motifs, pushed out on either side of the barriers that they create in the fore and middle ground. Fashion photographers like Guy Bourdin focused the viewers attention on the fetishism, the power relationship, and the potential for sexual violence that have always been implicit in fashion photography. Bourdin’s work represents the stereotyping of fashion photography expressed by the cultivation of identification with the unique instead of creating awareness of this type of stereotype. The dynamics of fashion photography tends to operate on the uppermost limit between the world of the consumer public and the world of utopia. However, fashion photography and particularly Bourdin’s narrative have converted this image’s utopia into dystopia. This image reveals that Bourdin did not make fashion tableaux but instead created images that broke down the hierarchy of meaning within a fashion image and with it the traditional mechanics of fashion photography. The fashion product became a symbolism and the intent rather than, potentially, any other aspect of a picture. Youth from Elizabeth Rouse’s Understanding Fashion Following the Second World War, there has been a general rise in consumerism. This has impacted society through the formation of youth subcultures that require certain visible characteristics to define and identify themselves. Traditionally, youth has been defiant and in search of defining unique identities styles and points of views through their behaviour. This has also crept into fashion and has led to youth fashion that tends to separate youth from other market segments through the utilisation of often provocative fashion symbols. These fashion symbols are more of a characteristic of youth subcultures that try to express their unique identities through the creation of differentiated visual identities. The upsurge of novel values, norms and identity felt through the sixties and the seventies has added to the creation of these youth subcultures and hence their fashion. Another rather noticeable thing is the creation of these youth subcultures in opposition to leading political issues. The realm of fashion is utilised in order to express the distaste for present political values by youth through the use of certain fashion symbols in both clothes and accessories. The basic contention remains the same – the presentation of the youth’s ideas and expressing them through the use of fashion symbols. This practice has deeply rooted itself into fashion culture from the post Second World War period to the modern day. Youth fashion is more defined by current ideologies and issues as well as reactions to them than by anything else. One of the more noticeable traits of youth subcultures is that they know what they want and hence they coerce the fashion world to respond to their needs. Bibliography Cotton, C. & Verthime, S., 2003. Guy Bourdin. London: V&A. Gingeras, A.M., 2006. Guy Bourdin. 1st ed. London: Phaidon Press. McCabe, E., 2005. The Making of Great Photographs: approaches and techniques of the masters. Newton Abbot: David & Charles. Rouse, E., 1989. Youth. In Understanding Fashion. 1st ed. London: Grafton Books. pp.282-311. Read More