Women in Fashion Photography - Essay Example

Throughout history, artistic representation of the human body in a particular age has guided our understanding of issues such as sexuality, personal identity, gender and ideology of the time and culture in which it is embedded. In the last two centuries, photography has come into its own, and the genre of fashion photography in the last century or so. To understand and comment on the portrayal of women and its inherent contradictions in fashion photography, it is essential that we differentiate it from other types like those associated to journalism, art, glamour or portraiture and define it exactly for what it is. This is because some of the basic characteristics of female representation, and its contradictions in fashion photography derive from the very nature of the genre itself. Fashion photography is more than a photograph showing the clothes,accessories or the model, it is the creation of a fantasy. It embodies the fashion atmosphere of the moment and the mood of the time in a single image. It is an image that conveys a particular lifestyle,and is different from catalogue photography, which is intended to directly sell clothes. In a catalogue shot, a woman is shaped closer to real proportions in realistic settings, in keeping with the intent of direct marketing, and she looks, albeit a little blankly, at the viewer. In a whole lot of fashion photography, however, the idea is far beyond clothes, it is about a particular fashion orientation, and so the model is fantastical in keeping with the image to be conveyed. She often looks away from the camera, in affected disdain for the women who are looking at her from across a magazine page, unendowed by her attributes that are matchless in drawing the "male gaze".Good fashion photography is more like a short film, it needs an ambience and a dream, a concept that evolves, and originality and good co-ordination between a whole team of creative people, where the entire look is contrived to a particular attitude or aesthetic. The make-up artists and lighting effects contribute as much to it as the model who provides a blank canvas for the image, and the photographer, who provides the eye through which it is to be viewed. "We're all brought up on fabulously glamourous Vogue models, and we don't realise that they don't look like that in real life. It is just that the photographers are terribly clever. Women are constantly presented with a false image of beauty that nobody can attain, not even the most beautiful, unless you've got an entourage of make up, wardrobe and hair backing you upI really resent the pressure put on women to alter ourselves" ( Donohoe, 2001) As fashion photographer Cecil Beaton once summed it up, "Fashion photography is an insidious profession.... It is up to the fashion photographer to create an illusion... it makes the observer see what he should see." With few exceptions, it is not true to life, as documentary or journalistic photographs usually is, nor is the persona projected real, as in the case of portrait photography. The female body is mainly intended to seduce, to arouse envy and a desire in the audience to become like the woman in the photograph by evoking the feeling one will experience when one uses the featured product. The body in all its glory is made to represent the things the audience does not have, but needs to acquire in order to be as fashionable as the model, and thus encourage the audience to become consumers. With the advent of technology, a majority of fashion photos that portray women with "perfect" bodies are enhanced by modern technology to achieve the effect. "Photographs are airbrushed or otherwise altered to remove any lines, bumps, or lumps - anything less than "perfection." If the ideal of beauty is physically unattainable, then consumers will never be able to attain the image they want, and therefore there will be an endless demand for new beauty products. This is the reason for the incredible proliferation of the weight-loss, fashion, and cosmetics industries, which are among the largest and most profitable consumer industries."(Kilborne,1999) And this is where contradictions that surround the representation of the female body in fashion photography begin to emerge. Firstly, in creating a fantasy, photography adds a dimension to a woman's body image that does not exist in real life. It is usually an impossible paragon, built around a small minority of possibly very young, very tall, very slim, long-necked, long-legged, narrow-hipped female bodies which represent two percent of the natural woman body types. "Perhaps most disturbing is the fact that media images of female beauty are unattainable for all but a very small number of women. Researchers generating a computer model of a woman with Barbie-doll proportions, for example, found that her back would be too weak to support the weight of her upper body, and her body would be too narrow to contain more than half a liver and a few centimeters of bowel. A real woman built that way would suffer from chronic diarrhea and eventually die from malnutrition."( "Beauty and Body image in the Media") But it is this shape that is projected as the ideal in fashion photography, just as in other media. The lissome ideal is a far cry from what is commonly possible, but it is imposed nevertheless, in an expectation that the usually female target audience will aspire to it, thus creating a consumer market in beauty products,clothes and accessories. As Katharina Linder defines the portrayal of women in Vogue, which continues to be an iconic fashion magazine: "In Vogue, sexualised images are the primary way of portraying women in positions of inferiority and low social power. This portrayal of women as inferior and "flawed" is a necessity for the existence of a women's fashion magazine such as Vogue, which is primarily a means for advertising and selling products that are suggested to be a "cure" for women's feelings of inferiority and inappropriateness. The illusion is created that purchasing and using these products will make them sexy and beautiful, and thus happy and successful."(Linder,2004) Such representation of women's bodies is in direct contradiction to reality, calculated to create a negative self image through comparison in common women, which seeks consolation in the products featured. It intensely encourages consumerism because the desired look is fictional, and impossible to perfectly achieve in normal lifestyles. This use of the female body and image to "sell", has long been a part of fashion photography, in even less obvious instances, like the first action fashion shot in 1933 by Martin Munkacsi, where a woman is captured on film for the first time in fashion photography not posed as a decorative object, but as a real woman in action. According to Hilary Radner: This action is 'staged', 'made', rather than 'taken' affirming the duplicity of the moment. The model is 'to be looked at'. She 'sells' the new 'sports-wear' look, as well as a set of specific items. She is not an athlete or soldier performing a designated task with an external goal. She represents something other than her 'self', even as she offers a model of this 'self' for the woman reader.(Radner, 2001) A lack of individuality or unique vision has been the fate of almost all women portrayed in fashion photography: the way their body is posed and how it looks, the style they project and their "unique" look are not their own, and they are seldom allowed to contribute their substance to the process. Jennifer Craik quotes Naomi Campbell, one of the supermodels of our time to illustrate this loss of "voice": "Part of the problem is that people only take models at face value. In a way, what we do is like acting, except that we don't speak. Because we don't speak, we don't have anything to say. What we try to do is project all our emotion and personality through our faces, but that can be misconstrued. ... When you have a very visual job, your appearance is taken to be the most important thing about you. There is no defence."(Craik,1994) In ironic contradiction, it is this fictional individuality that inspires the audience to try and emulate the models' "effortless" and "natural" bodies, clothes and attitude, put together in an image which a team of talented people has actually worked for hours to produce. The sublimation of the model's identity brings us to the third contradiction surrounding female bodies in fashion photography, namely, the imposition of the photographer's vision. Ever since the sixties when sex and glamour began to become an integral part of fashion in the works of those like David Bailey, Terrence Donovan and Brian Duffy (to whom the bodies were often more important than the clothes) fashion pictures have often been used as a vehicle for self-expression by some of the world's greatest photographers, notably Helmut Newton. Newton is considered the godfather of modern fashion photography and his work shows his own definitive vision of women, and their bodies: ".....women who take the lead rather than follow it; women who love and desire whenever and whomever they like, and in whatever way they like; women full of health and vigor, enjoying the resplendence and vitality of their sinewy bodies, bodies over which they themselves have sole command; women who are both responsible and willing."(Marquet) In a new found world of sexual freedom where contraceptives were available for the first time, women's bodies and sexual behavior were freed from the associations with motherhood , and it was Newton's intention to document this through his carefully orchestrated fantasy-based photography. But his work had an equal measure of glamour and sexual depravity : woman crouching in horse saddles and designer boots or riveted to the wall like the car parts which surround her, as factory workers pass by blindly below. This representation of the female form, though used as a metaphor and not reality, was in sharp opposition to how women wanted to see themselves, and he was understandably accused of misogyny in feminist circles. Another such fashion photographer was Guy Boudin, who made " made women look otherworldly, inhuman;" (Freeman, 2003) in order to express his " fear of feminism's effect on female sexuality"(Freeman, 2003). In these cases, the lines between fashion photography and photographic art are blurred, and the woman's body becomes somewhat of an art object, a medium to convey the artistic genius of the photographer. The body receives more attention than the clothes draping it, which is ironical, because traditionally, clothes are supposed to have first place. The settings, lighting, make-up and hair-style, not to mention the attire or lack of it, invest the female body with cultural, sociological and even political meanings. More often than not , the messages conveyed may fall short of, or even subvert the feministic ideal. Female form has also come across strongly in the work of those like Francesco Scavullo, and Corinne Day, with enough impact to create women's body icons . While Scavullo brought a buxom quality to the ideal fashion image by celebrating the sexuality of women and the intensity of their desires, Day gave the fashion world the phenomenon that was Kate Moss, and reversed fashionable ideas of bodily beauty to a great extent. Shorn of make-up, in dingy surroundings, with an androgynous, pre-pubescent body, Moss became the idealisation of the female form in the nineties, giving wide coinage to terms like grunge and heroine chic. While the female body ideal had seen its thin phases through Twiggy in the sixties, the image was still glamorised and made-up, but Day began to depict the female body and persona as she saw it, without adornment. She herself defines her own style as: "The "grunge look" as people called my style, simply showed girls as they really are, without make-up, styled hair, flattering light."In contrast to the vacant gazes of the earlier models, Moss actually looks into the camera, with a piercing, intelligent, smoldering gaze. It is the persona that is important to Day, as she confesses about her attitude while shooting with Moss:"When I was modelling, the photographs were always about the photographer, about him, not about the subject and I reversed it, and that's what I did with Kate, I captured her presence." In Day's gaze, the woman in front of the camera impresses with her identity, not her body which is almost desexed, in extreme retaliation to the trends in the Eighties: The backlash against 1980's materialism was reflected in the grunge, deconstruction and minimalism of the nineties. Fashion images became more about real life and attitude than the clothes themselves. Skinny, suburban girls modelled street smart clothes. Kate Moss epitomised the dazed and confused waif look. (Hunter) But Day, in capturing gritty realism and intimacy, had gone to the other extreme with the female body in the Nineties. While portraying Moss as the icon of contemporary beauty she had vaulted into omnipresence an undernourished and sickly symbol of the female body, invoked a dangerous aspiration towards thinness in teenagers and other young women alike, and aroused heated debates on eating disorders like anorexia. "Corinne Day's photographs of the female body offer a perfect example of counter-representations or affirmations of denaturalised, de-essentialised bodies which are turned into fields of alternative signification. It is the way in which Day photographs femininity that opens-up an area for reconceiving the way in which sexed subjects are understood." (Gargett,2003) Just as the female body in earlier times was a medium on which to project sexuality and promote consumerism, Day's work represents the female form as part of a youth culture set against the glamour and sensationalisation of fashion that avoids voyeurism, and fictional settings. While there is now a tendency of returning towards female curves in fashion spreads, Day's influence is still seen in the contemporary attempts to retain in the female form a genuine persona, feelings and intelligence. But instead of underlining the intellect of the woman depicted, it seeks to portray sexual emotions, somewhat influenced by pornography. Here, the spectacle becomes a pagan celebration of the female body, paradoxically meant not for heterosexual male consumption, but for the female audience as a point of identification: " Other typical shots in women's fashion photography are even more explicitly erotic, presenting to the female spectator an image typically found in pornography: the image of an all too receptive, quite nearly orgasmic woman waiting to be taken by more than the camera."(Fuss,1998) With increasing commercialisation at the turn of the century however , the clothes have begun to carry more importance. The female body has taken a backseat in some cases, in order to let the clothes "hang" well and enable the audience to better picture themselves in the clothes. This has given rise to the contradiction of the weak female form in fashion images in an era when fitness is much prized. Another factor conspicuous by its absence in fashion photography is the depiction of aging women. Fashion is about a youthful body, and despite the irony of a majority of consumers with high buying power in the age group of thirty to fifty, the women who serve as models have changed over to pre-pubescent girls in pseudo-erotic poses, so much so as to raise concerns about the possible overexposure of teenage fashion audience to sexuality. Fashion photography renders youth extremely desirable, a commodity which is essential for happiness. It totally ignores the natural metamorphosis of the female body with age, choosing instead to replace an aging model with a young one in order to keep up the myth of perpetual youth. In conclusion, fashion photography has had a tremendous effect on how women see themselves in the modern world. In creating a fantasy, it has projected impossible ideals in terms of body shape, encouraged consumerism by claiming to portray the epitome of beauty in vogue, provided role models by eulogising a fictional individuality, and injected contradictions in visual representations of the female frame. It has undergone transitions according to the socio-cultural trends of the time, influencing fashion, and in turn being governed by it while sublimating, subjugating or substantiating the female identity according to the dictates of the age. In a world driven by publicity and consumerism, standardisation of clothes, and the reign of the image of the moment, the impact of fashion photography cannot be underestimated. It will continue to depict the ever youthful female form and, in some ways, to dictate it, fostering contradictions in the representation of the woman's body in aid of fashion and commercialism. Works Cited "Beauty and Body Image in the Media", Media Awareness Network.20 Nov 2005 Craik, J. The Face of Fashion. New York: Routledge, 1994.p.87 Donohoe, A. Independent 4 March 2001. Freeman, H. "Photography - French fashion photographer Guy Bourdin". New Statesman, 21 Apr 2003 Fuss, D. " Fashion and the Homospectatorial look". On Fashion. ed. Benstock, S & Suzanne Ferriss, Rutgers University Press, 1998 Gargett, A."Fast Times - The Photography of Corinne Day".get UNDERGROUND.com.5 Jan 2003.20 Nov 2005 Hilary Radner, Embodying the Single Girl in the 1960s, in ed. J. Entwistle, Body Dressing (Oxford, New York: Berg, 2001), p. 186. Hunter, A. "Fashion Photography - A Historical Perspective". The New Millenium. Garfnet.20 Nov 2005 Kilborne, J.Deadly Persuasion: Why Women and Girls Must Fight the Addictive Power of Advertising New York: Free Press, 1999 Linder, K, "Images of women in general interest and fashion magazine advertisements from 1955 to 2002".Sex Roles: A Journal of Research. Oct 2004 Marquet, F."Helmut Newton: Work".Staatliche Museen zu Berlin. 20 Nov 2005. Read More