Re: [Leica] Why fashion photography sucks

["animal" <s.jessurun95@chello.nl>]

> 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.
Allthough i find your response interesting in a cynical way that reminds me
of the work of Bret Easton Ellis ,i not suprisingly dont share your view at
all .
A lot of the photos make me fall in love instantely maybe with the exeption
of the large format tableaux of Richard Avedon .
Call me a primitive reptile if you wish but I believe that we have evolved
in such a matter that appearance is important to us.
And also that our subconcious is more intelligent then ourselves.So that the
instant attraction we feel to some sensory cues maybe the result of a
process which we dont understand but nevertheless is wiser then our
conscious thought.
For instance in Testinos work i feel his love for the ladies in question and
also that they deserve it.Unfortunately for most of us that is difficult to
test .I mean to tst that they are indeed as nice as portreyed.
sorry for the yuckspeak
simon jessurun

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