The Idea of Disordered Reasoning in Fashion Photography - Essay Example

In what ways does fashion photography explore the idea of "disordered reasoning"? Before proceeding to explore about ‘disordered reasoning’, let us give a brief description of the idea. Any reasoning not justified properly or lacks the ability to be perceived in an accurate manner can be referred to in the context of disordered reason. In art and photography, this term has been used to justify those ambiguities that are present and are considered highly prestigious in glamour or nude photography with a numb justification and has set a standard that might be applied to living bodies. Such ambiguities that are present in fashion photography include the visual representation of the female body that before 1980s was a risky business for artists as well as photographers. Disordered reasoning occurs to an observer who is unfamiliar with academic discourses on Western visual culture and feminism, and suppresses this culture as a form of censorship that works against the best interests of women. Visual art of the 1990s made it clear to the uninformed spectator that he can view art in a naked female body that is helpful in marketing, advertising a product and photography and play an active part in popular media. Surrealism Surrealism was the root cause of the disordered reasoning in the field of photography. The image of disordered reason emerged when surrealists started believing in new forms of symbolic interpretation while perceiving photography as a combination of art and abstraction (Roberts, 1998, p. 112). The epoch witnessed this image for only a limited time period and enjoyed its experience as a contribution to photographic practice, however later the postmodernist promoters embedded its significance in a cultural context thereby adopting all its pros and cons together in the social reality. The surrealist movement of photography was based on post-structuralism which through the achievements of surrealist photography created an estrangement between human perception and its surroundings by providing a free play to the politically educated eye which in return suggested fresh looks of analysing photography (Wright, 1999, p. 139). On the other hand, postmodernist photography was the advent of surrealist manipulations which were applied to photographic nudes and depicted notions like energy is released from the acts of sex and aura is a manifestation of representing innerself (Marion, 2006). Emerged in the 1980s, surrealism yield fashion vision when photographers detected imaginary treatment on the female figure in their work. The contemporary practitioners deployed various devices and techniques, such as distortion through the use of unfocused lenses and double exposure, to achieve an idea of convulsive beauty in their images. Male or female figures, phallus in nature is acquired in terms of style or sexual politics and such images of the body in pieces, are highly fetishised, and are unable to demonstrate a positive or empowering portrayal of femininity. All they demonstrate is a reversal of gender roles and the transgressive play on power and identity that the phallic woman implies, however, does not necessarily have to result in negative images of women. Moreover, the phallic woman is not the exclusive province of surrealist art, and nor does she have to be symbolised in the form of a castrated penis (Jobling, 1999, p. 162). Surrealism developed a unique function of ambiguity in fashion photography where it borrowed from renaissance, the ability to see photograph not as an image but as a magnum opus that reveal a model’s independent existence. Today, fashion photography elucidates the idea of disordered reasoning by justifying the presence of diverse circumstances, opportunities, events and images that we see in our daily lives. Photographs are capable of making strange the familiar sights and objects of not our outer world but also the world within us i.e., the sub conscious that captures important moments in our lives. Photographs acquaint us with images that would otherwise be inaccessible, and since fashion photographs transform our minds, they have the power to make even the most familiar models appear strange (Savedoff, 2000, p. 2). Criticism Disordered reason has been criticized for the trends it has set in fashion photography since it has been studied as a philosophical issue in which the human body has perceived the virtue of celebrating its position in a labour market in the form of sexual provocation, openness and gender neutrality (Roberts, 1998, p. 172). Many photographers believe that the notion ‘substituting signs of the real for the real’ works as a best explanation of nude photography but critics believe that the impact of postmodern aesthetics on the iconography of such ‘exotic’ fashion automatically dissociates from whatsoever be the reasoning (Jobling, 1999, p. 5). The equivalence between photographed object and photographed picture of any object is achieved through its flatness (Savedoff, 2000, p. 3) and glamour in photography reveals the bodily art work of a model in the context of nudity, exoticism, and sexual abilities. This way the disordered reasoning clearly expresses an attitude which bears witness to the fact that fashion photography can both make a profound impact on the social and cultural scene, and have the potential to make a lasting rather than fleeting impression on the consciousness of any individual. Moreover, as the arguments surrounding fashion modelling demonstrate, it does not always offer up an idealised or a desirable ‘image’ of who we want to be, or even of who we are, however by looking beneath the surface of the fashion magazine, it is evident that a whole cluster of more complex and serious issues emerge concerning the objectification of sex, gender, race and class, as well as the politics of consumption and pleasure (Jobling, 1999, p. 3). Disordered reasoning is more apparent in fashion photographs than in any other way bodies are represented in various narrative contexts and situations. On a different level, the analysis of a nude model in a photograph depicts similarity to what we can find in our inner selves, the lust, power, glamour and other themes represented in the spreads of nostalgia, travel, surrealism, sex and gender. Thus we recognise in the epoch of today’s photography what we used to see in the past, the examination of body fascism, the part played by Surrealism in the representation of the woman, and, in particular, the border-crossing between straight and gay sexualities that is connoted in many contemporary fashion spreads. Surreal, close to nature and following sexual lusts and pleasure, photographs provoke glamour and a sense of modernism of bodily experiences. Considering the act of glamour in light of feminist criticism suggests that fashion photography induces violence, for the model is split in two objects or personalities. One plays the coroner and the other a corpse undergoing autopsy (Rugg, 1997, p. 17). Models actions and motives are hard to interpret with innocent, simplicity or calculated deviousness; it is their other half that enjoys good labour. While the other half seeks reasons to justify the action, the results are unusual. In the most frequently reproduced image, situation and the pose is controlled by presenting oneself as a classically glamorous woman who knows how to reveal her female sexuality. Conscious of her ambiguous sexual appeal photographers enjoy capturing and manipulating it. Since glamour in photography use the name of art in creating marketable products, brands and persons, it presents a new idiom of modern woman who appears as a star well known among and circulated to every conceivable life-style magazine. Because the studios sold primarily to women, the products that came to be associated with the female star were largely domestic ranging from intimate cosmetics or lingerie, for example, to functional household objects, to more subtle aspects of style and taste (Dance & Robertson, 2002, p. 108). Consequences – from photography to pornography Fashion photography on one hand serves the consumer market and acquires name and fame beneficial for the model, while on the other it raises the suppressed issue of disordered reasoning. Well known photographers photocompositions reinstate the female nude as a symbol of beauty, with all its latent eroticism. Such photocompositions representing glamour in art attract the visitors by the nude functioning serving as a metaphor for the self, and that as such as a vehicle for the exploration of own sexuality of the model (Mcdonald, 2001, p. 39). Such photocompositions elucidate the true nature of ignoring the social construction of the model’s body while downplaying the pernicious involutions of the male gaze. Mcdonald (2001) points out what Burton has explained that her work appears innocently to disregard the preoccupations of feminist criticism over the past ten to twenty years (Mcdonald, 2001, p. 39). This show uncertainty on part of the photographers who after being astutely attuned to the contradictions of their era were able to manage its uncertainties in the late 1990s. Later such a ‘disordered reason’ invented pornography, least bothering the time when all distinctions pertaining to sexuality and identity seemed to have collapsed or to be under review. Pornography added a new dimension to fashion photography and flooded the media where models posed erotically to sell expensive clothes. Pornography pressurised by the moral majority to expose and punish deviant sexual practices, such as incest. As a result when regulatory practices were imposed on the postmodern body, it encouraged critics to blame photographers and forced to prohibit the female nude art showing signs of strain. Motives behind disordered reasons That was the time when Burton justified ‘postmodern’ photography by defying the ban with a hint of rebelliousness, making concessions to feminism and art styles that are implicit rather than overt (Mcdonald, 2001, p. 39). This is one of the situations confronted disordered reasoning. Other reasons include when during a fashion shoot, artificial colouring on the skin of some of the women are applied to suggest the possibility of their engagement in some sort of foul play. These traces of working environment connote the womans or models’ guilt, perhaps, but, as such, they signify an interiorised and psychological subjectivity which in most cases is not sane. The most significant aspect behind the motives is that signalling of a move out of the psychology laboratory into the natural environment. Psychology is deeply related with glamour and for its relevance to photography, Gibson’s theory of perception, based upon ecological consideration, amounts to a strong objection to the eye-camera analogy (Wright, 1999, p. 29). This theory states that while shifting the emphasis from the passive registration of retinal images to perception based upon the whole organism’s active engagement with the environment, the close comparison between the model’s eye and the camera begins to fall away (Wright, 1999, p. 29). Such a psychological justification or aspect of photography amounts to a radical challenge to those theories of perception which seems practical whenever a model is engaged in photographic process. Other motives behind disordered reason allure nudity in a manner in which they repeat to the explicit visual patterns and forms that pornography constructs, thus embodying the selfish nature of photography itself. What such photography represents to us is a configuration of nature as a sign and arresting the body in motion, which under the umbrella of ‘artistic photography’ invokes an intuition of eroticism. Disordered Reasoning and social function Society considers the initial starting-point as realism that was placed in the context of the photographer’s intentions of formalism, deeply concerned with the material nature of the photograph, either as a process or as an object. Expressionism took place where the subject and the medium were used as a vehicle for expressing the photographer’s ideas or feelings, or an expression of the society or political context of the image (Wright, 1999, p. 173). Fashion photography added a new dimension to the subject of feminism which in fact entailed its own program of deconstruction, the dismantling of restrictive and oppressive gender constructions and to this end, feminism makes use of poststructuralist discursive practice (Rugg, 1997, p. 16). Gender construction or destruction looms large that the power of self-agency is lost in the midst of arguing that the self is constructed solely through body language. Models as photographic images are directly involved in feminist practice, for feminists have recognised in photographs the objectification of the body, the creation of the body as passive image that cannot resist construction from the viewing subject. Feminist studies in particular have construed the viewer as male and the objectified body as female. To photographers and audience, it is called female physical freedom while feminists call it female abuse in the name of art. Whatever we name fashion photography, disordered reasoning is one of the most significant aspects ending up in exoticism as ‘development of modernism’. In other words, disordered reasoning provided us with a chance to perceive photography out of the new model of female physicality which was an expression of a new understanding of sexual and social relations between men and women. This reasoning made us think that art is not enough to cover the pitfalls of fashion photography. References Dance Robert & Robertson Bruce, (2002) Ruth Harriet Louise and Hollywood Glamour Photography: University of California Press: Berkeley, CA. Jobling Paul, (1999) Fashion Spreads: Word and Image in Fashion Photography since 1980: Berg: Oxford. Marion L. Sara, (2006) “Getting Beyond: Is Photography a Lost Tradition?” Afterimage, 33(6), p. 32. Mcdonald Helen, (2001) Erotic Ambiguities: The Female Nude in Art: Routledge: London. Roberts John (1998) The art of interruption: realism, photography and the everyday, Manchester: Manchester University Press. Rugg Haverty Linda, (1997) Picturing Ourselves: Photography and Autobiography: University of Chicago Press: Chicago, IL. Savedoff E. Barbara, (2000) Transforming Images: How Photography Complicates the Picture: Cornell University Press: Ithaca, NY. Wright Terence, (1999) The Photography Handbook: Routledge: New York. Read More