Archived posting to the Leica Users Group, 2003/01/04

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Subject: Re: [Leica] Why fashion photography sucks
From: "animal" <s.jessurun95@chello.nl>
Date: Sun, 5 Jan 2003 01:04:26 +0100
References: <71FBE037-2030-11D7-9291-000393802534@mac.com>

> I think most (all?) fashion photography is truly negative.  It treats
> human beings like objects -- Helmut Newton being at the forefront of
> this.  In his pictures, you might as well be looking at sports cars, or
> watches, or architecture.  The women (and men) are nothing more than a
> different set of curved surfaces to be lit in an intriguing manner and
> shot from a novel  (navel?) angle.  Personality, persona, lifestyle,
> humanism, dignity, is all but completely banished from almost all
> fashion photography that I've come across.  Indeed, the
> cross-processing, extreme lighting, retouching, jaded graphicness of a
> lot of fashion photography does all it can to suck out the last
> vestiges of human-ness from the images, leaving a clinically clean,
> artificial surface, stripped down to it's bare visual form that bears a
> resemblance to a real person, but dispenses with all the messy
> substance of what actually makes people interesting in the first place.
>
> M.
Forgot to ask you in an earlier post but what do you mean by extreme
lighting, the sun?
brgds
simon jessurun

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In reply to: Message from Martin Howard <mvhoward@mac.com> ([Leica] Why fashion photography sucks)