Archived posting to the Leica Users Group, 2003/01/04

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Subject: Re: [Leica] Why fashion photography sucks
From: John Collier <jbcollier@shaw.ca>
Date: Sat, 04 Jan 2003 17:00:55 -0700

Humans are objects and they do seem to like being manipulated as well. 
"All the messy substance" is what most humans try to hide. Look at me: 
I am simple – no complications – simply divine! Come and worship ME.

Do we not all leave out much of the messy bits in our daily 
interactions? I at times admire and at times loathe fashion 
photographers. They treat others openly as we all treat others in 
secret.

John Collier

PS: I should not hit send but I have been weighed down by extensive 
readings in evolutionary psychology and...


On Saturday, January 4, 2003, at 03:04 PM, Martin Howard wrote:

> Animal wrote:
>
>> Those fashion guys are incredible.
>
> 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.
>
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