Archived posting to the Leica Users Group, 2003/01/05
[Author Prev] [Author Next] [Thread Prev] [Thread Next] [Author Index] [Topic Index] [Home] [Search]Amen! To say nothing of the fact that much of the most successful and popular fashion photography serves up the degrading, the 'degenerate,' the pathetic and the 'perverse' as that to which we should all aspire - remember 'heroin chic?' Sexually provocative poses by underage models, or those who look under age? Certainly there's allot of creative fashion photography - and I assume that Martin is referring to studio type fashion work, Ted, not shooting runway models. But the question is how that creativity is being used. It's a lonnnnnng way from early Avedon to the Calvin Klein underwear ads. B. D. - -----Original Message----- From: owner-leica-users@mejac.palo-alto.ca.us [mailto:owner-leica-users@mejac.palo-alto.ca.us] On Behalf Of Martin Howard Sent: Saturday, January 04, 2003 5:04 PM To: leica-users@mejac.palo-alto.ca.us Subject: [Leica] Why fashion photography sucks Animal wrote: > Those fashion guys are incredible. 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. - -- To unsubscribe, see http://mejac.palo-alto.ca.us/leica-users/unsub.html - -- To unsubscribe, see http://mejac.palo-alto.ca.us/leica-users/unsub.html