Archived posting to the Leica Users Group, 2003/01/04
[Author Prev] [Author Next] [Thread Prev] [Thread Next] [Author Index] [Topic Index] [Home] [Search]In a message dated 1/4/03 2:06:20 PM, mvhoward@mac.com writes: < 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. >> 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 behind the lens? Kim - -- To unsubscribe, see http://mejac.palo-alto.ca.us/leica-users/unsub.html