Photography, Fashion and Art

Even at a shoot next to a luxury beach lodge, the world of professional fashion photography is fast paced, constantly evolving and demanding of world class quality. Moreover, photographers must have an intimate knowledge of the technicalities of photography as well as an intuitive grasp of cutting edge aesthetics.

This latter point is especially pertinent as fashion, whether Haute Couture or baby room furniture,  finds itself at the avant-garde of culture, and a central demand placed on high-fashion houses is to continually set new trends that filter down into the more commercially oriented activities of the fashion world. As such, the job of the high-fashion photographer is very much more like fine-art photography than commercial or journalistic photography. A definite perk of the job, though, is that high-fashion photographers have large budgets to work with, and a team of other professionals who work to ensure that the final images are, for want of a better phrase, visually arresting.

Definition

In simple terms, fashion photography is the genre of photography (itself a very broad profession) that specialises in the aesthetic and culturally appropriate exhibition of clothing and other accessory fashion items. Self-evidently, fashion photography has a close relationship with fashion media (like the editorial magazines Elle, Vogue, Vanity Fair, et al.) and fashion advertising (that would appear on bill-boards and various other public spaces).

Fashion photography, as already alluded to, is primarily concerned with the aesthetic and culturally meaningful presentation of cultural products (fashion items), and in itself has become a highly developed and nuanced form of art photography.

History

Surprisingly, fashion photography has a relatively long history as the fashion industry (at the time forming itself into a similar market force that we experience today) took advantage of photography as soon as the technology achieved some form of recognition as a legitimate medium. Not surprisingly, this owes to the fact that in representation, clothing is best experienced in a visual format.

As early as 1856, Adolphe Braun published a large volume of photographs that took the Countess di Castiglione, Virginia Oldini, as their central subject. The Countess was a Tuscan noblewoman in the court of Napoleon III, and essentially modelled the official court garb for the photographer. This makes Braun the first known fashion photographer, and the Countess the first ever fashion model.

In the early twentieth century, halftone printing techniques advanced to the point to where fashion photography could be featured in mass-distributed magazines. Magazines that included photographs included the French magazine La Mode Practique, and Vogue. The photographer Edward Steichen also contributed to the idea of fashion as an art form through the utilisation of carefully considered aesthetic decisions when capturing images.

Steichen is also considered the father of modern fashion photography as he took photos of gowns designed by the lauded couturier, Paul Poiret. Central to the growth of fashion photography as a fine art is the idea that the photographs don’t merely display an object, but rather consciously bring out the formal and cultural qualities inherent in the fashion item.

Famous high fashion photographers include the likes of Richard Avedon, Helmut Newton, Francesco Scavullo, and Herb Ritts. Contemporary well-known photographers include Patrick Demarchelier, Steven Meisel, Mario Testino, Peter Lindbergh and the perfectionistic Annie Leibovitz.