Fashion Photography

FASHION PHOTOGRAPHY

Fashion photography has been in exitence since 1839. Since before then there were always fashionable clothes, but photography came into place to sell and advertise these fashionable clothes. At the start of the 20'th century, halftone printing allowed fashion photographs to be placed in magazines, newspapers and pretty much everywhere else. 

Fasion photography really started to rise in the early 1900's, Vogue & Harpers Bazaar (vogues rival) were the leaders in Fashion photography in the 1920's - 1930's and especially house photographers such as Edward Steichen, George Hoyningen-Huene, Horst P. Horst and Cecil Beaton transformed the genre into an outstanding art form.

Fashion photography started booming in the 1960's where culture, music, political and style movements exploded; ever since then Fashion has been a huge apart of our society. 
Fashion photography has been growing and moving forward very quickly, english-born editoring-chief of Vogue Anna Wintour quoted “It’s always about timing. If it’s too soon, no one understands. If it’s too late, everyone’s forgotten.” 

As one of the biggest fashion magazines, Vogue's total circulation was 1.3 million in 2011; meaning that based upon averages nearly 5 million people read or viewed Vogue's magazine that year. 

Fashion photographers from all around the world are desperate to join the top magazines. Vogue, Elle and Esquire are just a few of the prestigious fashion magazines. One of vogue's most famous photographers was American photographer Irving Penn (1917-2009) who said he never wanted to “be a personage” & was nevertheless one of the twentieth century’s great artists, a photographer with a style so uniquely his own that it had already earned its own “aesthetic copyright,” as Vogue put it, by 1949 when the jeans-and-sneakers-wearing Jersey boy had been working for the magazine for only three years.

He worked for Vogue for seven decades. He shot everything: fashion, still lifes, movie stars, food, nudes, flowers, makeup and 158 covers. 

Fashion & Portrait photography have many similarities, but they have big differences as well. 

Portraiture is focusing on the model: their face, complexion, bone structure - whilst this is similar to Fashion, portraiture is more focused on portraying the emotion, character and feeling of the person.  The shots are usually taken you inspire some sort of emotion upon the viewer. 

Fashion is different, the model's face, skin, complexion and bone structure are all important, however the main point is showing off the clothes - for example in the picture above. The model is the perfect fit for the dress, her weight, hair and eyes are all perfect for showing off this specific dress (It looks good). 

Image manipulation is both portraiture and fashion is hugely common, in no means is this a bad thing. There is a line that must not be crossed in my opinion. Editing software is great to correct colours, lighting, shadows and complexion. However, this can always be taken a step further when we start to get into manipulation of the body (waist ratio ect). I believe in making something look better than is real; however manipulating the shape of a key part of the photograph is not acceptable. Otherwise, you might as well just animate the photo, instead of having anything real in it. 

Extreme physical and edited manipulation

The other bad sides to manipulation are the effect it has on society, many girls (and boys) of all ages are constantly bombarded with beautiful (yet extremely edited) models. This has an impact on their life, they do not feel up to standard in comparison.

The condition of the models are also very poor, there is a huge debate about bulimia and other weight (vainity) related diseases. 

Every photograph that comes out of a Fashion magazine will be edited in post-production: sometimes I think its within reason, however, sometimes the editing is just too much.

Another debate with Fashion is that when is between the creative and commercial side; when is it creative enough? when is it commercial enough? The constant battle between Vogue's chief-editor Anna Wintour and creative director Grace Coddington. 

Both of these people play key roles in Vogue. Grace Coddington is constantly fighting for creative free-reign over Vogue, and Anna Wintour is constantly keeping it balanced between for the commercial side. I think its a difficult thing to keep in balance, creativity is pushing new ideas, when commercial is making them viable for people to understand them (and buy it). 

This works great when there is perfect synergy between the two; and I think Vogue does it very well.