| Photographic images play a key role in defining global fashion culture and in charting its discursive space. They are seen by many as the driving force behind the fashion system, with cultural pundits and industry creatives heralding the photograph as fashion’s ‘ultimate signifier’ (Saville in Burgoyne 2002: 36). Since the early 1990s, fashion photography has commanded an increasing share of public consciousness, as well as a growing amount of wall space in museums, galleries and auction houses. It has engaged with new technologies and challenged ideals of beauty, it has proved politically and aesthetically provocative, economically lucrative, and ideologically potent. Despite this, fashion photography has been paid little attention by the scholarly and critical community.
Printed media on fashion photography are everywhere these days: accounts of photographers, designers and trends, volumes of portraiture and street chic, magazines and themed collections, exhibition catalogues, monographs, limitededition folios and bookworks. Critical accounts of fashion photography are much less easy to find. The limited number that exist are scattered throughout exhibition catalogues, magazines, journals, anthologies, newspapers and other media. For its part, photographic criticism has yet to engage with fashion photography in a sustained way, sharing with other forms of cultural criticism a kind of unspoken aversion to the medium. Fashion photography’s coupling with industry and commerce, its flirtation with the frivolous and the ephemeral, its role in the marketing and selling of garments, the questionable part it plays in the construction of feminine identity – none of these have helped it to gain status in the eyes of visual and cultural studies. Lumped in with other forms of advertising, fashion images have too often been subjected to a limited range of analytical tools, most of them inherited from other discourses. |
