OUGD603: Academic Writings on Fashion Photography & Editorial

In Material Culture in The Social World by Tim Dant, Dant discusses how the practice of living with objects can contribute to character, social life and societal values, interesting to consider when attempting to market brands.

Artwork is to give the viewer a sense of displacement...Being ‘moved’ is often a term to reflect our emotions, however in the case of some artwork, fashion photography and advertising in peculiar, often you are moved physically to the point of view of the creator, and creating a co-presence between creator and viewer, giving the audience a sense of being ‘here’ and ‘there’- flitting through historical times and essentially being omnipresent. (Dent, 1999: 155). It is also argued by Dent that visual artwork and communication in this way is also broken down into two key attributes- one to do with the representation of the form of the visual world, the other is ‘to do with emotion and the evocation of human presence’. (Dent, 1999: 155).

According to Dant, for Marx, Freud and Baudrillard fetishism is a way to critique the over-valuation and symbolic societal meaning of goods, compared to their real value, inanimate objects (Dant, 1999: 40). However, Dant himself argues that often fetishism is not based on the notion of realism, but is a tool used to equate the social value of things culturally, with identifiable properties and characteristics with them. The history into the concept of fetishism has been used to identify a misunderstanding of goods, objects, or even people to suggest inherent value or powers into a subject. ‘By treating these fetishes as ‘unreal’ overlooks the importance of the object as a mediator of social value’ (Dant, 1999: 41).

Mike Featherstone also points out the twentieth century art movements which incorporated commodity and consumer culture into art, (Warhol being one example), to the treating of lifestyles as a form of art (fashion photography ofen representing the excessive elitist); finally, the massive increase in the flow of signs and images (Featherstone, 1991: 66-7), meaning the contents of everyday life take on aesthetic significance.

James Gibson (1979: 272) says that a ‘picture’ is not a representation of reality but a record in two dimensions of ‘invariants of sculpture’, the forms and shapes presented to vision.  Gibson is saying that the primary use for photography is to “record” (Dant, 1999: 155), overlooking any possibility to introduce art with the medium.