[Leica] Why fashion photography sucks

[James Michael Lennon <jim@JMLENNON.COM>]

Kim is absolutely right. Sometimes we all put too much pressure on 
ourselves. Pretending to be great photographers like Ansel Adams, 
HCB, or Mahatma Gandhi is utterly pretentious, n'est pas?  With 
Gandhi's unique approach to life, is it any wonder that he was a 
Leica photographer?  Strictly a one camera/one lens man, he kept his 
IIIc right beside his spinning wheel, ready to seize the decisive 
moment.

Admittedly, Gandhi didn't shoot a lot of fashion, busy as he was 
driving British colonialists off the Indian subcontinent. And maybe 
that is why he is not so much in vogue any more. Nowadays, people are 
more practical. These days there is no time to be thoughtful, much 
less compassionate, which is why (as Kim insightfully points out) 
Martin Howard's comments that fashion photography a la Helmut Newton 
leaves something to be desired, is woefully out of touch with the 
times. Gandhi is out of fashion. War is in fashion. Isn't that ironic?

Original message:
Date: Sat, 4 Jan 2003 22:50:26 EST
From: Teresa299@aol.com
Subject: Re: [Leica] Why fashion photography sucks
Message-ID: <84.6579950.2b490582@aol.com>
References:

Kim wrote:
Humans as objects have been the focus of any number of photographers, 
not just fashion photographers.  Most nude studies, especially ones 
that border on the abstract treat humans as objects.
Besides, what's wrong with being an object?
Nature photographers shoot trees.
Macro photographers shoot bugs.
Commercial photographers shoot anything that someone will pay them to 
shoot. Do we all have to pretend that we're Mahatma Ghandi [sic] 
behind the lens?

Martin Howard wrote:
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.
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