fashion photography

fashion photography is a very strange and creative world of photography. Fashion photography was first used in 1839, This was the first time that photo's of clothes were taken to help sell them (advertise them) . The genre of fashion photography is devoted to displaying clothing and other fashion items. fashion photography is normally used for advertisement of clothes or fashion magazines such as vogue or vanity fair. Fashion photography is now no longer based on just the clothes alone but the photographs are now often taken in exotic places with different accessories and the most highly payed models.


To what degree should an image be manipulated to go into a fashion magazine
Even from the first ever fashion photograph changes have been made to it to make it more appealing to the eye, even if it was just make up. The main argument is that over editing photos gives young girls the wrong impression of what a woman should look like. I personally believe that people should not be so easily mislead by photos. The most often changes are simple things like colour and texture of the models skin other things to look out for is making the model appear slimmer than the original photo and changing the size of other body features. the degree of which these photos are edited varies depending on the publication they are being used for. here is an example of a air brushed photo

In the 1890's airbrushes were developed and photo retouching changed forever. Camera equipment was continually improving and the new capabilities for smooth edits with airbrushes led to an incredibly high demand for photos with moles, scars, and other imperfections removed. Also highly popular were large oval prints airbrushed with colour (colour photography was not available until much later). Demand was so high that factories were built to handle the demand for airbrushed photos.

As you can see in this photo of Britney Spears she has been airbrushed heavily, this photo was used in a government campaign to show young girls that what you see in the magazines is not necessarily true.The first thing I noticed when I saw this photo was that she has quite obviously been made to appear slimmer. even right down to her feet have been edited to make her more ascetically appealing.



Portraiture

portraiture

.Diane Arbus

.Walker Evans

.Richard Avedon

.Tony vaccaro

.Larry Clark

notes:

Larry clark in my opinion is the most interesting photographer that was covered as he took photographs of people who were not trying to put on a fake aesthetic and act as if they were someone else. He photographed the times that he had with his friends and that although they were viewed by the public and frowned apon as they were self destructive and were often thought of to be disgusting as they often used themes of drug use, sexual encounters and violence. In 2002, Clark spent several hours in a police cell after punching and trying to strangle Hamish McAlpine, the head of Metro Tartan, the UK distributor for Clark's film Ken Park. According to McAlpine, who was left with a broken nose, the incident arose from an argument about Israel and the Middle East, and he claims that he did not provoke Clark. The latter dismissed this version of events as "such bullshit, such a fucking lie," stating that McAlpine had described the September 11, 2001 attacks as "the best thing to have ever happened to America" and opined that child victims of terrorist attacks in Israel "fucking deserve to die." Clark later commented: "When someone gets up in my face with bullshit like this, I’m not gonna roll over and lick my nuts." this shows that he has always been a very opinionated person and that he really did spend a lot of time in the surroundings that his photographs were of.

Walker evans: An American photographer best known for his work for the farm Security Administration  Documenting the effects of the great depression. Many of his works are in the permanent collections of museums. He studied French literature for a year at Williams College spending much of his time in the school's library, before dropping out. Evans was a passionate reader and writer, and in 1945 became a staff writer at Time magazine. Shortly afterward he became an editor at Fortune magazine through 1965. That year, he became a professor of photography on the faculty for Graphic Design at the Yale University School of Art (formerly the Yale School of Art and Architecture).In 1973, Evans began to work with the innovative Polaroid SX-70 camera and an unlimited supply of film from its manufacturer. The virtues of the camera fit perfectly with his search for a concise yet poetic vision of the world: its instant prints were, for the infirm seventy-year-old photographer, what scissors and cut paper were for the aging Matisse. The unique SX-70 prints are the artist's last photographs, the culmination of half a century of work in photography. With the new camera, Evans returned to several of his enduring themes—among the most important of which are signs, posters, and their ultimate reduction, the letter forms themselves.


Richard Avedon (May 15, 1923 – October 1, 2004), born Richard Avonda was an American fashion and portrait photographer. An obituary published in The New York Times said that "his fashion and portrait photographs helped define America's image of style, beauty and culture for the last half-century.In 1944, Avedon began working as an advertising photographer for a department store, but was quickly discovered by Alexey Brodovitch, the art director for the fashion magazine Harper's Bazaar. Lillian Bassman also promoted Avedon's career at Harper's. In 1945 his photographs began appearing in Junior Bazaar and, a year later, in Bazaar itself.by the 1960s Avedon had turned his energies toward making studio portraits of civil rights workers, politicians and cultural dissidents of various stripes in an America fissured by discord and violence.He began to branch out and photographed patients of mental hospitals, the Civil Rights Movement in 1963, protesters of the Vietnam War, and later the fall of the Berlin Wall. An exceedingly personal book called “Nothing Personal, with a text by his high school classmate James Baldwin appeared in 1964. During this period, Avedon also created two famous sets of portraits of The Beatles. The first, taken in mid to late 1967, became one of the first major rock poster series, and consisted of five striking psychedelic portraits of the group — four heavily solarized individual color portraits.He is also distinguished by his large prints, sometimes measuring over three feet in height. His large-format portrait work of drifters, miners, cowboys and others from the western United States became a best-selling book and traveling exhibit entitled In the American West, and is regarded as an important hallmark in 20th century portrait photography, and by some as Avedon's magnum opus. Commissioned by the Amon carter museum in Fort Worth, Texas, it was a six-year project Avedon embarked on in 1979, that produced 125 portraits of people in the American west who caught Avedon's eye.Avedon was drawn to working people such as miners and oil field workers in their soiled work clothes, unemployed drifters, and teenagers growing up in the West circa 1979-84. When first published and exhibited, In the American West was criticized for showing what some considered to be a disparaging view of America. Avedon was also lauded for treating his subjects with the attention and dignity usually reserved for the politically powerful and celebrities. Laura Wilson served as Avedon's assistant during the creation of In the American West and in 2003 published a photo book documenting the experiences, Avedon at Work, In the American West.He was awarded The Royal Photographic Society's Special 150th Anniversary Medal and Honorary Fellowship (HonFRPS) in recognition of a sustained, significant contribution to the art of photography in 2003.