While flipping through fashion magazines, a surprising image oftentimes catches our attention among the overly aseptic and standardized photographic series. The photogra- pher’s gaze—his narrative, his vision of the female body and fashion, or his often pictorial references—catches the eye! Is this really another fashion photograph?
The challenge here, in fact this publication’s raison d’être, is to remove these images from the pages of magazines and publish them in a book. From the coffee table to the book- shelf… A major leap indeed, larger than one might imagine.
The pages of books, with their different paper and thicker density, provide quite a different status; the obligation to sell dreams and garments shifts to a different perspective. Magazine captions, whose purpose is to inform potential customers, have vanished; these few lines of text that support the fashion are consciously omitted in order to display only the image and the photographer’s vision. Removing them from their original context creates an altered definition— binging them no doubt to a more “artistic” one!
A narrative that reaches far beyond fashion and tells us of our contemporary world, of new aesthetics at play, and of novel ways of considering this world. The client-reader is often oblivious to this. And for these rare photographers, the pages of magazines become a field for experimentation, available to a large audience, larger than that of a small, cold, “white cube” gallery. As if to smuggle art in, as photographer Erwin Blumenfeld would say.
Beyond garments, the photographer thus exhibited reaches another land, the world of art, or an approximation to it. Also invited here are photographers who exhibit in galleries (or museums). When vertical photography meets magazines’ horizontal photography! Artists who master the codes of photography and appearance in their production and lift them away from the world of fashion or mere assignments therefore punctuate the pages of this book in an original face to face: Is this a fashion photograph? Rather confusing. Fashion photography in museums, artists’ works in fashion magazines, everything is blurred. So what! Classifications no longer apply.
Richard Avedon, Irving Penn, and Helmut Newton, to name only these three “mon- sters,” integrated the art market and the museum space as they worked almost exclusively on commission for fashion or advertising. They paved the way for the younger generations presented here.
Patrick Rémy
BOOK
The Art of Fashion Photography
Patrick Rémy
Prestel
Hardcover, 240 pages
24×28, 9.4 x 11.0 Inches
220 colour illustrations
ISBN: 978-3-7913-4840-7
$ 55.00 | £ 35.00 | € 49
