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The Counterfeit Body: Fashion Photography and the Deceptions of Femininity, Sexuality, Authenticity and Self in the 1950s, 60s and 70s The Fashion Photograph and the Fate of its Subject in the Age of the Exploited Image Tina Butler, mongabay.com May 9, 2005 Looking at the repercussions of the media age in regard to the fate of the original image, the figure of the fashion photographer as a star-maker links to this discussion of reproduction and representation in a mass form. Benjamin argues that as areas and elements of alternative and subversive culture are appropriated by mediums of mass production and representation and widely and eventually oversaturate the market, individual qualities are no longer distinguishable as originals. Using this idea, the increasing popularity of star and celebrity culture renders the artistic viability of fashion photography irredeemable and void. As the characters of Thomas, Mars and Avery, portraying fashion photographers in the previously referenced films, create their ‘stars,' their novelty ‘products' are compromised and reduced by their prepackaged approval of quality and marketability in the public sphere. Their images of the ‘stars,' rather than the individuals themselves, become commercial currency. The photographers themselves become a kind of commodity, and simultaneous producers of commodities. Brookes interprets Adorno's theories to make her argument about fashion photographers. [Adorno] saw the stamp of the machine everywhere, reducing everything to a ‘sameness,' reflecting and reinforcing a sense of alienation in all aspects of private life and experience. As mass entertainment and advertising became more dominant, they increasingly leveled experience down to the ‘lowest common denominator.' The threat of the culture industry was the production and reproduction of sameness in all spheres of cultural life. (20, 21) Through increased production and reproduction of images, identity and originality are nearly impossible to retain. Everything becomes a copy of some vague or possibly nonexistent entity. This purely non-sexual yet fetishizing and coveting of women of the aesthetic modes of other women argument seems difficult to substantiate, as emphasis is increasingly placed on the body, emphasis equal to or even greater than the garments resting on it. Indeed, in the beginnings of serious and focused fashion photography in the 1930s, the clothes were the paramount concentration. The body was de-emphasized. The pictured models did not assert any kind of independence; the clothes that covered them subsumed their bodies. Their corporeal nature was rendered abstract or denied outright (Radner 133). Emphasis on the garment over the body continued until the early 1950s. As the importance of the display of the model increased, shifts in presentation became more apparent. From the late 50s on, the body became the focus and existed in state of constant display. Another way fashion photography can be understood and examined within the context of the Frankfurt School theorists is in Adorno's collaborative work with Max Horkheimer, "The Culture Industry: Enlightenment as Mass Deception." In this well-known piece, issues of social propriety and the submission of creativity to the homogenizing whims of the culture industry are confronted and deconstructed. The authors assert that no form in the cultural mainstream has fully preserved its original and possibly alternative or subversive qualities and roots. In being represented by the culture industry, every form is inevitably and inescapably filtered and altered to be made more appropriate for popular culture. This uniformity ensures and functions as a form of social control, censoring any possible deviant ideas from infiltrating and stirring up the masses. Where fashion relates to this system is the fact of its inclusion within the culture industry. Fashion photographs ultimately become part of the public domain, and in this process, even the most scandalous or inventive images are toned down or censored by the institution. No truly creative and innovative work survives this process of social streamlining and sanitizing with integrity intact. It is this reality that can be credited in part to fashion photography's repetitious and derivative character. Consuming the images, and subsequently their messages, the viewer is participating in the culture industry and perpetuating the cycle of homogenization. Of course, those viewers who are prompted to buy whatever is being sold are more actively and directly feeding the apparatus, but by even consuming the images alone, a purpose is being served that benefits the institution. More actively involved in this process is the figure of the fashion photographer, who creates and presents the ‘star,' introducing this new ‘product' into the commercial and public spheres. The more a person becomes a persona, more object than subject, the more the audience feels a sense of removal from that individual. Even though the consumer may gaze at and take in the image of the star almost anywhere, this act is one of alienating and isolating distance. Benjamin comments on the distancing effect between the viewer and the image in his essay, "The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction," as referenced by Reka C. V. Buckley and Stephen Gundle in the essay "Flash Trash: Gianni Versace and the Theory and Practice of Glamour. By analyzing consumption and art in the industrial era, he notes the repercussions and implications mediated or determined by mass production of objects, specifically art objects, and the likely destruction of ‘aura' with widespread dispersal and distribution (334). As the star loses his or her human qualities with increased representation as an image, this separation is presented as a negative outcome. In the case of language and images however, Benjamin asserts that this division is an act of liberation. Brookes borrows his ideas and asserts, "The emancipation of the image from its caption, and of the product-image from the product, means that the advertising image has become the pure imperative, not divisible into form and content, the pure veneer, the absolute façade for and of itself" (22). As the image is divorced from its original context, meanings shift and transform, and visual communication is privileged over verbal. And yet, the ultimate consumer of such images ends up losing, because they learn to accept the reproduction (the substitute) and dismiss the uniqueness of every reality, most significantly, even when that ‘reality' is a person (Buckley and Gundle 334). When the image increases in visibility, it becomes seemingly more accessible and desirable. With this simultaneous pervasiveness and illusion of proximity and attainability and distance and unavailability, the consumer seeks some kind of tangible manifestation of the ‘object.' Buckley and Gundle cite Benjamin, who writes, Every day the urge grows stronger to get a hold of an object at a very close range by way of its likeness, its reproduction. Unmistakably, reproduction as offered by picture magazines and newsreels differs from the image seen by the unarmed eye. Uniqueness and permanence are as closely linked in the latter as are transitoriness and reproducibility in the former. (334) Mass reproduced images of desired objects offer a quick fix, but no finite solution for the want. Fashion photography and advertising assembles and proffers an idealized illusion. No reality can match the crafted image. And when the illusion comes to substitute the actuality, public perception and expectations are irrevocably altered through this fragmentation and replacement. News index | RSS | Add to MyYahoo! Advertisements: Organic Apparel from Patagonia | Insect-repelling clothing |
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