Ellen Von Unwerth was born in Germany’s town Frankfurt in 1954. She had been in foster care at times in Bavaria. After graduating from high school, she joined the circus as an assistant to do stunts and magic shows. When she was 20, she was approached by a photographer who invited her to model. Soon she shifted to Paris to chase her career. She modeled for some really good photographers of that era. She kept that profession for ten years in the world of fashion and enjoyed her field. She felt that a model was restricted to listening orders regarding her poses. Hence she held a camera and decided to work behind it since she had gained experience in the field. With this step, she could let the models show some creativity in poses. At this time she was being given essential insight about photography by a photographer whom she was living with. Only after a few years, she came in to the light by doing a shoot for GUESS, Claudia Schiffer as the model. Works by Von Unwerth have been featured in magazines, such as Vanity Fair, The Face, i-D, Interview, Twill, Arena and Vogue. In 1991, she received first prize at the International Festival of Fashion Photography.
Key Image but up for change
By 1998, the American Photo Magazine listed her among the Most Important People in Photography. Since this time, she has been on the radar as being among the best female photographers with a natural talent to capture the sensuality of women. She was lucky that she experienced modeling herself and this part of her career aids her in understanding models’ minds, unlike photographers who lack this know-how and are on the other end of the bridge. Ellen Von Unwerth did not like the static positions of models, having to stand in a single pose for a really long time, so she reversed this culture at least in her photography. She promoted playful, kinetic and progressing gestures and poses in a model. Since the beginning of her career as an adult, she has been photographing or has been the subject of photography herself. In the industry, she is noted for her fashion photography because she pushes the limits female sexuality in photography in general and in fashion. She has created outstanding editorial pages for famous magazines. Additionally, she has made commercials and music videos. Hence she is not just a photographer but a director who specializes in femininity with eroticism.
Her work has been used for promotions and covers for albums. She promoted Duran Duran’s album in 1990 titled Liberty and in 1997 for Medazzaland. She also worked on other covers, like Pop Life by Bananarama, 1991; Am I the Kinda Girl? by Cathy Dennis, 1996; The Velvet Rope by Janet Jackson, 1997; Saints and Sinners by All Saints, 2000; Life for Rent by Dido, 2003; Blackout by Britney Spears, 2007; Back to the Basics, Keeps Gettin’ Better: Decade of hit by Christina Aguilera, 2006 and 2008; and Talk That Talk and Rated by Rihanna. In addition, Von Unwerth has been the director of commercial films for brands, including Clinique, Equinox, Revlon and among other. She has also published photo books flourishing with natural, unrestricted and sexy women. She has worked with many influential photographers, models, musicians, actors and other personalities. It can be said that she is addicted to photography. Ellen von Unwerth is one of the most influential fashion photographers alive today. Her unmistakable aesthetic blends beautiful women, eroticism and a sense of playfulness with consummate skill. Her ability to get more from her subjects helps her to create alternate realities where things are just that little bit more free and fun. Her hedonistic teenage years spent between circus tents and hippie communes remain a big aesthetic influence and she draws upon these experiences to weave narrative into her photography. Her ability to perfectly balance escapism with a sense of timeless glamour has led her to work for some of the world’s most renowned publications and luxurious brands.
WORD LIST
1. Sexy 2. Seductive 3. Racy 4. Rule breaking 5. Sensual 6. Feminine 7. Erotic 8. Playful 9. Fun 10. Sexual 11. Passionate 12. Intimate 13. Role reverse 14. Captivating 15. Dirty 16. Romantic 17. Charming 18. Colorless 19. Important 20. Suggestive 21. Provocative 22. movement 23. craziness 24. pushes boundaries 25. female sexuality 26. empowering 27. “boob!” 28. “hot” 29. German (from article) 30. pornographic 31. aesthetic 32. circus 33. hippie communes 34. showing personality 35. character 36. confidence 37. happy accident 38. sophisticated 39. glamorous 40. powerful 41. freedom 42. transformation 42. sexuality 43. non-conformist 44. creative 45. escapism 46. female sexuality 47. outstanding 48. famous 49. addiction 50. raw
Childhood and Early Modeling Career
Born in 1954 in Frankfurt, Germany, von Unwerth experienced a tough and testing childhood. At the age of two she tragically lost both her parents and spent many years moving around orphanages and foster homes in the city. Despite this turbulent upbringing, von Unwerth recalls that she had a positive outlook on life as far back as she can remember. In her book, Fräulein, she recalls that she had a sunny disposition. “I didn’t suffer too much,” she said. “In fact, I remember my childhood as being fairly happy”. This ability to remain upbeat has served her well throughout her career and has become entrenched, stylistically, in her photography. Von Unwerth encourages her models to showcase their personalities: they come across as happy and engaging; the antithesis of the unobtainable trophies portrayed by many of her contemporaries. Her desire to showcase confidence and character can be traced back to her time as a professional model, a career she fell into by pure chance. After being spotted by a talent scout at university in Munich, she was asked to do a trial shoot for Bravo, a popular German teen magazine. It went well and she soon moved to Paris, working with influential photographers such as Guy Bourdin and Oliviero Toscani. Although she enjoyed many aspects of the profession – the dressing up, meeting new people and traveling – the constant demands and scrutiny left her feeling exasperated. She never felt comfortable showing her true self in front of the camera, believing that the photographers she worked with purposefully stifled her personality. “I wanted to have fun and jump around in front of the camera, but I was always being told to stop and sit still,” she later said. “I always found this really frustrating.” As the years passed, the work became increasingly tedious and she found the superficial nature of the industry harder to deal with. Despite falling out of love with modeling, she began paying more attention to how photographers worked, closely observing their methods. The practices and techniques she absorbed in this period would later go on to inform both her photographic style and work ethos.
Introduction to Photography and Early Career
Like so many of her passions, von Unwerth’s introduction to photography occurred by happy accident. Her fixation began after a boyfriend at the time gave her a camera as a gift. After a brief lesson on the camera’s technical operation, she was soon photographing her friends and the places she travelled to through work. What started out as a hobby turned into obsession after Jill, a cult French fashion magazine from the early ’80s, published some of her travel shots of a trip to Kenya. She was soon contributing images to them on a regular basis. Her early photography featured plenty of movement and energy and her mix of spontaneity and classical glamour soon attracted many admirers, including British designer Katharine Hamnett. Seeing her early images in Jill, Hamnett offered her work shooting an advertising campaign in 1989 and the resulting black and white images continued her street and reportage style. Later that year, she received her big break when she shot an advertising campaign for Guess with a German model, Claudia Schiffer. The sensual, sophisticated imagery was a departure for von Unwerth but the shoot would transform the fortunes of both women. It was widely seen as the moment the world was made aware of Schiffer, who would go on to become one of the most successful supermodels of all time. This shoot announced von Unwerth to the fashion world and subsequently landed her a job shooting for Vogue Italia in 1990. As her reputation grew, her style developed. She blended the glamor-
ous eroticism of Helmut Newton with a uniquely feminine view of sexuality. It exuded the necessary sophistication and opulence required for the glossy magazines, but underneath the surface was a suggestive irreverence that fitted the feel of the early ’90s perfectly. Over the next 20 years, she continued to shoot powerful, intimate images of women for clients such as Playboy, Vanity Fair, GQ, Vogue and Agent Provocateur. Always choosing to focus on a model’s personality and sense of fun, her stylized photography managed to balance art and fantasy with sadomasochistic themes to create visceral, eye-catching imagery.
Her Background as Inspiration
There are many reoccurring themes in von Unwerth’s work and a lot of her imagery tends to focus of the dual ideas of freedom and transformation. Although these powerful motifs are prominent throughout her career, they can be traced back to her formative teenage years. Soon after leaving foster care, von Unwerth relocated to Oberstdorf, a small town high up in the mountains to the south east of Munich. She and several friends started a hippie commune in an old farmhouse; she said of the time that “it was here that I started to enjoy my life.” With artists, performers and musicians from all over Europe passing through, a creative community began to emerge and this new group of people piqued her interest in unusual and non-conformist behavior. Although she didn’t realize it yet, the experiences she had during this time would become a central
theme in her later photography. This love of the alternative lifestyle was further cemented when she began work at a circus in Munich in the early ’80s. Although it was only a brief period of employment, the bright lights, vibrant visuals and elaborate costumes stylistically significant in her later work. Many of her most enduring shoots, including a Harper’s Bazaar editorial in 2015, feature the big top as a backdrop. For von Unwerth, the circus is a succinct visual metaphor, a subtle way to tell stories of escapism, freedom and transformation.
Albums for Janet Jackson, Bananarama, All Saints, Britney Spears and Christina Aguilera soon followed. She has also worked extensively with Rihanna, most notably shooting the covers of both Rated R and Talk That Talk. The relationship has since developed, with the two working together on several photoshoots, including a notorious GQ cover story in 2014. The pair seem to be a perfect match, with the effervescent Rihanna taking little persuading from von Unwerth to showcase her coquettish and playful side.
Work in Music
Legacy
Although widely known for her work in fashion, von Unwerth has also managed to establish herself as an internationally renowned photographer across a range of subject matters. Early in her career, she merged her love of photography and music when she shot promotional imagery for British band Duran Duran’s 1990 album, Liberty. She would continue to work with the group over the next decade, shooting album covers and tour posters and even directing the video to their single, “Electric Barbarella”. As she established a reputation for herself, many more musicians sought her artistic guidance.
In a career that has spanned well over 25 years, Ellen von Unwerth has dramatically helped shape the way women are portrayed on camera. Working in a profession dominated by men, her unique approach to displaying sexuality has broken with convention and paved the way for many female photographers. As well as striking a different path to her male counterparts, her photography manages to capture the very essence of desire, eroticism and pleasure – three cornerstones of modern fashion advertising. Her inimitable use of sensual imagery has not only led to commercial and artistic success, but, in a
broader sense, it has altered the way female sexuality is represented within fashion. “It’s not special any more to be a photographer,” she says. “Even when I take a picture, everybody stands next to me and takes the same picture. Five minutes later it’s on everyone else’s Instagram and I’m old news – so I’m forced to take pictures on my iPhone too.” She tells me she can usually tell the difference between a photograph a man has taken and one a woman has taken. “But I find it crazy how women photograph themselves all the time. When I was a girl and looked in the mirror, my stepmother would come in and give me a slap. There was this idea that if you did that, the devil would get in you and steal your personality. Now everyone does this. I ask models sometimes, ‘Do you have to take so many selfies?’ And they say: ‘Only when I take selfies do I get likes.’ It’s sad! Narcissism is so celebrated in our society, sometimes people lose interest in other people.” ‘I always give the models something to do’: Ellen von Unwerth. Photograph: Steffen Kugler It is clear that everyone had a whole lot of giggles in Bavaria. Von Unwerth motions towards an image of
three women topless on a sled: “This model is Miss Russia and she brought a lot of vodka to the shoot. So they were drinking behind my back in the snow.” Von Unwerth is not much given to analysing. When I allude to the “male gaze” she has no idea what I’m talking about. When I find myself grasping for the word “pornography” she shoots back: “Have you ever seen a porno?” Well, one of your pictures does literally depict two people having sex in a hayloft. “It’s more inspired by a B-movie sense of camp. I wouldn’t say porno.” (After our interview, one of her assistants calls me to make sure that I don’t think it’s pornographic.) Of course, the word I should have reached for was erotic. Or perhaps simply German. “Look at the scandal there was with Janet Jackson over here,” she says referring to the Super Bowl nipple slip of 2004. “It was a boob! It’s something you should be proud of and not hide. Especially if it’s nice. Ha ha ha ha! In Germany it is not like this. Even if you go to a park in Berlin in the summer, everybody is naked and playing frisbee. You would get arrested if you did that in LA.”
Erotic: adjective
1. arousing or satisfying sexual desire: an erotic dance. 2. of, relating to, or treating of sexual love; amatory: 3. subject to or marked by strong sexual desire
Charming: adjective
1. pleasing; delightful: a charming child. 2. using charm; exercising magic power.
Feminine: adjective
1. pertaining to a woman or girl: 2. having qualities traditionally ascribed to women, as sensitivity or gentleness. 3. effeminate; womanish: 4. belonging to the female sex; female:
Freedom: noun
1. the state of being free or at liberty rather than in confinement or under physical restraint: 2. exemption from external control, interference, regulation, etc. 3. the power to determine action without restraint. 5. personal liberty, as opposed to bondage or slavery: 6. exemption from the presence of anything specified (usually followed by from): freedom from fear. 7. the absence of or release from ties, obligations, etc. 8. ease or facility of movement or action: to enjoy the freedom of living in the country. 9. frankness of manner or speech. 10. general exemption or immunity: 11. the absence of ceremony or reserve. 12. a liberty taken. 13. a particular immunity or privilege enjoyed, as by a city or corporation: freedom to levy taxes. 14. civil liberty, as opposed to subjection to an arbitrary or despotic government. 15. the right to enjoy all the privileges or special rights of citizenship, membership, etc., in a community or the like.
Passionate: adjective
1. having, compelled by, or ruled by intense emotion or strong feeling; fervid: a passionate advocate of socialism. 2. easily aroused to or influenced by sexual desire; ardently sensual. 3. expressing, showing, or marked by intense or strong feeling; emotional: passionate language. 4. intense or vehement, as emotions or feelings: passionate grief. 5. easily moved to anger; quick-tempered; irascible.
Power: noun
1. ability to do or act; capability of doing or accomplishing something. 2. political or national strength: the balance of power in Europe. 3. great or marked ability to do or act; strength; might; force.
Quotes
“I think that the obsession with technique is a male thing. I would rather search for a new model or location.” “Oh, ja, it’s very sexual there, even the clothes they push up the bosoms and there are lots and lots of sausages, ha ha ha,” she explains. “But you see so many images that are dark and depressing at the moment. All these sad women being sad! So I figured, let’s show girls having fun and enjoying life.” “When somebody’s not moving I get bored. I take two pictures and I say: ‘Great, I have it now.’ But I love the body in movement. I like the nude body in movement.”
Titles
Erotic Female + Ellen von Unweth Powerful Girls + Ellen von Unweth Ellen von Unweth + Female Body Movement Ellen von Unweth + Girlish Fun Ellen von Unweth + Girls Having Fun Seductive Freedom + Ellen von Unweth
Word Combinations Alluring Freedom* Glamorous Sensuality Glamourous Power Seductive Power Powerful Femininity Glamorous Freedom
Richard Avedon
American photographer Richard Avedon was best known for his work in the fashion world and for his minimalist portraits. He worked first as a photographer for the Merchant Marines, taking identification photos. He then moved to fashion, shooting for Harper’s Bazaar and Vogue, demanding that his models convey emotion and movement, a departure from the norm of motionless fashion photography. Richard Avedon was born on May 15, 1923 in New York City. His mother, Anna Avedon, came from a family of dress manufacturers, and his father, Jacob Israel Avedon, owned a clothing store called Avedon’s Fifth Avenue. Inspired by his parents’ clothing businesses, as a boy Avedon took a great interest in fashion, especially enjoying photographing the clothes in his father’s store. At the age of 12, he joined the YMHA (Young Men’s Hebrew Association) Camera Club. Avedon later described one childhood moment in particular as helping to kindle his interest in fashion photography: “One evening my father and I were walking down Fifth Avenue looking at the store windows,” he remembered. “In front of the Plaza Hotel, I saw a bald man with a camera posing a very beautiful woman against a tree. He lifted his head, adjusted her dress a little bit and took some photographs. Later, I saw the picture in Harper’s Bazaar. I didn’t understand why he’d taken her against that tree until I got to Paris a few years later: the tree in front of the Plaza had that same peeling bark you see all over the Champs-Elysees.” Avedon attended DeWitt Clinton High School in New York City, where one of his classmates and closest friends was the great writer James Baldwin. In addition to his continued interest in fashion and photography, in high school Avedon also developed an affinity for poetry. He and Baldwin served as co-editors of the school’s prestigious literary magazine, The Magpie, and during his senior year, in 1941, Avedon was named “Poet Laureate of New York City High Schools.” After high school, Avedon enrolled at Columbia University to study philosophy and poetry. However, he dropped out after only one year to serve in the United States Merchant Marine during World War II. As a Photographer’s Mate Second Class, his main duty was taking identification portraits of sailors. Avedon served in the Merchant Marine for two years, from 1942 to 1944.
Upon leaving the Merchant Marine in 1944, Avedon attended the New School for Social Research in New York City to study photography under Alexey Brodovitch, the acclaimed art director of Harper’s Bazaar. Avedon and Brodovitch formed a close bond, and within one year Avedon was hired as a staff photographer for the magazine. After several years photographing daily life in New York City, Avedon was assigned to cover the spring and fall fashion collections in Paris. While legendary editor Carmel Snow covered the runway shows, Avedon’s task was to stage photographs of models wearing the new fashions out in the city itself. Throughout the late 1940s and early 1950s he created elegant black-and-white photographs showcasing the latest fashions in real-life settings such as Paris’s picturesque cafes, cabarets and streetcars. Already established as one of the most talented young fashion photographers in the business, in 1955 Avedon made fashion and photography history when he staged a photo shoot at a circus. The iconic photograph of that shoot, “Dovima with Elephants,” features the most famous model of the time in a black Dior evening gown with a long white silk sash. She is posed between two elephants, her back serenely arched as she holds on to the trunk
of one elephant while reaching out fondly toward the other. The image remains one of the most strikingly original and iconic fashion photographs of all time. “He asked me to do extraordinary things,” Dovima said of Avedon. “But I always knew I was going to be part of a great picture.” Avedon served as a staff photographer for Harper’s Bazaar for 20 years, from 1945 to 1965. In addition to his fashion photography, he was also well known for his portraiture. His black-and-white portraits were remarkable for capturing the essential humanity and vulnerability lurking in such larger-than-life figures as President Dwight D. Eisenhower, Marilyn Monroe, Bob Dylan and The Beatles. During the 1960s, Avedon also expanded into more explicitly political photography. He did portraits of civil rights leaders such as Dr. Martin Luther King Jr., Malcolm X and Julian Bond, as well as segregationists such as Alabama Governor George Wallace, and ordinary people involved in demonstrations. In 1969, he shot a series of Vietnam War portraits that included the Chicago Seven, American soldiers and Vietnamese napalm victims.
Avedon left Harper’s Bazaar in 1965, and from 1966 to 1990 he worked as a photographer for Vogue, its chief rival among American fashion magazines. He continued to push the boundaries of fashion photography with surreal, provocative and often controversial pictures in which nudity, violence and death featured prominently. He also continued to take illuminating portraits of leading cultural and political figures, ranging from Stephen Sondheim and Toni Morrison to Hillary Clinton. In addition to his work for Vogue, Avedon was also a driving force behind photography’s emergence as a legitimate art form during the 1960s, ‘70s and ‘80s. In 1959 he published a book of photographs, Observations, featuring commentary by Truman Capote, and in 1964 he published Nothing Personal, another collection of photographs, with an essay by his old friend James Baldwin. In 1974 Avedon’s photographs of his terminally ill father were featured at the Museum of Modern Art, and the next year a selection of his portraits was displayed at the Marlborough Gallery. In 1977, a retrospective collection of his photographs, “Richard Avedon: Photographs 1947-1977,” was exhibited at the Metropolitan Museum of Art before beginning an international tour of many of the world’s most famous museums. As one of the first self-consciously artistic commercial photographers, Avedon played a large role in defining the artistic purpose and possibilities of the genre. “The moment an emotion or fact is transformed into a photograph it is no longer a fact but an opinion,” he once said. “There is no such thing as inaccuracy in a photograph. All photographs are accurate. None of them is the truth.”
Richard Avedon married a model named Dorcas Nowell in 1944, and they remained married for six years before parting ways in 1950. In 1951, he married a woman named Evelyn Franklin; they had one son, John, before they also divorced. In 1992, Avedon became the first staff photographer in the history of The New Yorker. “I’ve photographed just about everyone in the world,” he said at the time. “But what I hope to do is photograph people of accomplishment, not celebrity, and help define the difference once again.” His last project for The New Yorker, which remained unfinished, was a portfolio entitled “Democracy” that included portraits of political leaders such as Karl Rove and John Kerry as well as ordinary citizens engaged in political and social activism. Richard Avedon passed away on October 1, 2004, while on assignment for The New Yorker in San Antonio, Texas. He was 81 years old.
Sontag, On Photography
Humankind lingers unregenerately in Plato’s cave, still reveling, its age-old habit, in mere images of the truth. But being educated by photographs is not like being educated by older, more artisanal images. For one thing, there are a great many more images around, claiming our attention. The inventory started in 1839 and since then just about everything has been photographed, or so it seems. This very insatiability of the photographing eye changes the terms of confinement in the cave, our world. In teaching us a new visual code, photographs alter and enlarge our notions of what is worth looking at and what we have a right to observe. They are a grammar and, even more importantly, an ethics of seeing. Finally, the most grandiose result of the photographic enterprise is to give us the sense that we can hold the whole world in our heads -- as an anthology of images. To collect photographs is to collect the world. Movies and television programs light up walls, flicker, and go out; but with still photographs the image is also an object, lightweight, cheap to produce, easy to carry about, accumulate, store. In Godard’s Les Carabiniers (1963), two sluggish lumpen-peasants are lured into joining the King’s Army by the promise that they will be able to loot, rape, kill, or do whatever else they please to the enemy, and get rich. But the suitcase of booty that Michel-Ange and Ulysse triumphantly bring home, years later, to their wives turns out to contain only picture postcards, hundreds of them,
of Monuments, Department Stores, Mammals, Wonders of Nature, Methods of Transport, Works of Art, and other classified treasures from around the globe. Godard’s gag vividly parodies the equivocal magic of the photographic image., Photographs are perhaps the most mysterious of all the objects that make up, and thicken, the environment we recognize as modern. Photographs really are experience captured, and the camera is the ideal arm of consciousness in its acquisitive mood. To photograph is to appropriate the thing photographed. It means putting oneself into a certain relation to the world that feels like knowledge -- and, therefore, like power. A now notorious first fall into alienation, habituating people to abstract the world into printed words, is supposed to have engendered that surplus of Faustian energy and psychic damage needed to build modern, inorganic societies. But print seems a less treacherous form of leaching out the world, of turning it into a mental object, than photographic images, which now provide most of the knowledge people have about the look of the past and the reach of the present. What is written about a person or an event is frankly an interpretation, as are handmade visual statements, like paintings and drawings. Photographed images do not seem to be statements about the world so much as pieces of it, miniatures of reality that anyone can make or acquire.
Photographs, which fiddle with the scale of the world, themselves get reduced, blown up, cropped, retouched, doctored, tricked out. They age, plagued by the usual ills of paper objects; they disappear; they become valuable, and get bought and sold; they are reproduced. Photographs, which package the world, seem to invite packaging. They are stuck in albums, framed and set on tables, tacked on walls, projected as slides. Newspapers and magazines feature them; cops alphabetize them; museums exhibit them; publishers compile them. For many decades the book has been the most influential way of arranging (and usually miniaturizing) photographs, thereby guaranteeing them longevity, if not immortality -- photographs are fragile objects, easily torn or mislaid -- and a wider public. The photograph in a book is, obviously, the image of an image. But since it is, to begin with, a printed, smooth object, a photograph loses much less of its essential quality when reproduced in a book than a painting does. Still, the book is not a wholly satisfactory scheme for putting groups of photographs into general circulation. The sequence in which the photographs are to be looked at is proposed by the order of pages, but nothing holds readers to the recommended order or indicates the amount of time to be spent on each photograph. Chris Marker’s film, Si j’avais quatre dromadaires (1966), a brilliantly orchestrated meditation on photographs of all
sorts and themes, suggests a subtler and more rigorous way of packaging (and enlarging) still photographs. Both the order and the exact time for looking at each photograph are imposed; and there is a gain in visual legibility and emotional impact. But photographs transcribed in a film cease to be collectable objects, as they still are when served up in books. Photographs furnish evidence. Something we hear about, but doubt, seems proven when we’re shown a photograph of it. In one version of its utility, the camera record incriminates. Starting with their use by the Paris police in the murderous roundup of Communards in June 1871, photographs became a useful tool of modern states in the surveillance and control of their increasingly mobile populations. In another version of its utility, the camera record justifies. A photograph passes for incontrovertible proof that a given thing happened. The picture may distort; but there is always a presumption that something exists, or did exist, which is like what’s in the picture. Whatever the limitations (through amateurism) or pretensions (through artistry) of the individual photographer, a photograph -- any photograph -- seems to have a more innocent, and therefore more accurate, relation to visible reality than do other mimetic objects. Virtuosi of the noble image like Alfred Stieglitz and Paul Strand, composing mighty, unforgettable photographs decade after decade, still want, first of all, to show something “out there,” just like the Polaroid owner for whom
photographs are a handy, fast form of note-taking, or the shutterbug with a Brownie who takes snapshots as souvenirs of daily life. While a painting or a prose description can never be other than a narrowly selective interpretation, a photograph can be treated as a narrowly selective transparency. But despite the presumption of veracity that gives all photographs authority, interest, seductiveness, the work that photographers do is no generic exception to the usually shady commerce between art and truth. Even when photographers are most concerned with mirroring reality, they are still haunted by tacit imperatives of taste and conscience. The immensely gifted members of the Farm Security Administration photographic project of the late 1930s (among them Walker Evans, Dorothea Lange, Ben Shahn, Russell Lee) would take dozens of frontal pictures of one of their sharecropper subjects until satisfied that they had gotten just the right look on film -- the precise expression on the subject’s face that supported their own notions about poverty, light, dignity, texture, exploitation, and geometry. In deciding how a picture should look, in preferring one exposure to another, photographers are always imposing standards on their subjects. Although there is a sense in which the camera does indeed capture reality, not just interpret it, photographs are as much an interpretation of the world as paintings and drawings are. Those occasions when the taking of photographs is relatively undiscriminating, promiscuous, or self-effacing do not lessen the didacticism of the whole enterprise. This very passivity -- and ubiquity -- of the photographic record is photography’s “message,” its aggression. Images which idealize (like most fashion and animal photography) are no less aggressive than work which makes a virtue of plainness (like class pictures, still lifes of the bleaker sort, and mug shots). There is an aggression implicit in every use of the camera. This is as evident in the 1840s and 1850s, photography’s glorious first two decades, as in all the succeeding decades, during which technology made possible an ever increasing spread of that mentality which looks at the world as a set of potential photographs. Even for such early masters as David Octavius Hill and Julia Margaret Cameron who used the camera as a means of getting painterly images, the point of taking photographs was a vast departure from the aims of painters. From its start, photography implied the capture of the largest possible number of subjects. Painting never had so imperial a scope. The subsequent industrialization of camera technology only carried out a promise inherent in photography from its very beginning: to democratize all experiences by translating them into images. That age when taking photographs required a cumbersome and expensive contraption -- the toy of the clever, the wealthy, and the obsessed --
seems remote indeed from the era of sleek pocket cameras that invite anyone to take pictures. The first cameras, made in France and England in the early 1840s, had only inventors and buffs to operate them. Since there were then no professional photographers, there could not be amateurs either, and taking photographs had no clear social use; it was a gratuitous, that is, an artistic activity, though with few pretensions to being an art. It was only with its industrialization that photography came into its own as art. As industrialization provided social uses for the operations of the photographer, so the reaction against these uses reinforced the self-consciousness of photography-as-art.
Herb Lubalin
Herb Lubalin is an American graphic designer most known for his hand in the creation of the typeface Avant Garde and his logo designs. His logos are well known because of his use of using type to make an image. He also a designer for Avant Garde magazine, Eros, and Fact. He help found the International Typeface Corporation. He calls typography, typographics instead. He says what he does is designing letters. He was constantly given awards and medals for his advertising designs with Reiss Advertising 1940s through his creation of Avant Garde in the 1980s. He changed and influenced the way we see and design letters, words, and language. his creations show meaning, create voice, color, character, and individuality. Lubalin’s creations got rid of design boundaries.
Alexey Brodovitch
Alexey Brodovitch was the art director of Harper’s Bazar Magazine from 1934 to 1958. In Russia he could not attend school, so he and his family fled to Paris where his designs won awards. In 1930 he moved to America. He introduced to America a radically simple, modern style of graohic design from 1920s Europe. He made photography the backbone of modern magazine design because of his fasination from it. He created the expressionist photographic style that dominated photography in the 1950s. His designs became the model for modern magazine design, as his were much more than just placed type and image on a page. He concieved and commissioned all graphic art.
Johnathan Hoefler
Johnathan Hoefler is an American typeface designer. He founded The Hoefler Type Foundry started Hoefler & Frere-Jones with designer Tobias Frere-Jones. Hoefler has created typefaces for popular magazines such has The Rolling Stones, Harper’s Bazar, Esquire, Sports Illustrated, and The New York Times Magazine. He has also created typefaces for well known companies and businesses. He was included in this list because he creates typefaces for magazines and some of the typefaces he has created have an editorial feel to them.
Gail Anderson
Gail Anderson is a female graphic designer. She has worked at Random House, The Boston Globe Sunday Magazine, and was senior art director at Rolling Stone for 15 years. She was a medalist for AIGA in 2008. She currently teaches graphic design and has co-published books on design as well. While working at Rolling Stone she created many different types and styles of typograhic expressions. Her type style greatly contributed to the eclectric typography style that was widespread during the 1990s. She perfectly mixed old and new type style, making it perfectly contemporary. She was low-key, but became loud through her style. Anderson was able to find the perfect balance turning the digital 90s, not making it under or overly adornered. She studied design at the School of Visual Arts in New York, mentored by Paula Scher.
David Carson
David Carson is a graphic designer and surfer. He is best known for his “grunge typography” and his work on Ray Gun magazine. He had no formal design schooling and did it for fun while becoming a pro surfer. Carson designed the first 3 covers for Blue magazine, which he also named. His work broke all the rules of design. He also did work for companies like Pepsi, Nike, Nine Inch Nails, Prince, MTV Global, Warner Brothers, and more. His designs are self-indulgent as Carson believes a designer should pull from within themselves and put that into their work, something that is more important now that we use the computer more. Carson’s editorial designs are interpretations of what the article says. He doesn’t design to make the article ugly or pretty; he designs so it looks like what the article is saying. Carson worked for various surfing and snowboarding magazines, like Quiksilver and SURFportugal, because of his interest in surfing. When working for Ray Gun magazine he had total control over what the designs looked like and never had to get anyone’s approval. In Ray Gun, he was known for his experimental and deconstructive type design and art direction. David Carson also designed The Book of Probes using Marshall McLuhan’s aphorisms, quotes, and articles with his unpublished photos to create visual representations. Carson believes typography affects the message of a design. Carson designed a whole article, by Bryan Ferry, in Dingbats because he thought it was boring. He has done work for Microsoft, Nike, Nutergena Quicksilver, Nine Inch Nails. He was the most famous designer in the 90s because people outside of design had heard of him. He now gives a lot of talks to students and other designers. His designs are controversal in the design world between those that think a concept is the most important thing in a design and those that believe beauty is most important.
Tibor Kalman
Tibor Kalman was born in Budapest and came to America where he worked as a graphic designer. He was founding editor-in-chief of Colors, a magazine that focused on global awareness and multiculturalism. The magazine used bold graphic design, typography, and juxtaposition photosgraphs to send their message. M & Co is a design firm Kalman started with Carol Bokuniewicz and Loz Trovato. They did diverse corporate designs for companies like Talking Heads and Limited Corporation. Kalman influecned how designers think and how they define their roles in society. His work made him well known both inside the design world and outside of it. His design work called attention to events taking place, like race and sex movements. He urged designers to think about how their designs would affect the enviroment and to not just make stuff for the money. Kalman often called out other designs that “sold out to corporate capitalism.� He used his design to accomplish two things, which were good design and social responsibility. He used the unexpected to show good design. He saw graphic design as a means of mass communications, and thus used his designs to increase public awareness and educate viewers on public issues. To advertise M & Co, he sent companies a box containing a homeless-shelter meal and said he would match any donation they made. The next year he sent information on poverty. He was critized for using the issue of homelessness to promote himself, but he was sincere in what his actions, because of his past as a young immigrant in America.
Neville Brody
Neville Brody is an English graohic designer and art director most known for his work on The Face magazine. He also works for Arena magazine for 3 years, and designed album covers for The Bongos, Cabaret Voltaire, and Depeche Mode. He is a founder of Fontworks and created Research Studios. the Muesum of Modern Art is home to some of his works. Brody is influenced by Dadaism and Pop Art. He first started by experimenting with self-made san-serif typography.
Esquire Magazine
Esquire Magazine started in 1933 during the Great Depression but was still successful. The 3 founders, David A. Smart, Henry L. Jackson and Arnold Gingrich, all had different focues (men’s fashion, publishing, and business) which is what made up the magazine. The Petty Girls and Varga Girls were published in the magazine during the 40s.
Alluring Freedom Photography by Ellen von Unwerth
The Body in Movement Photography by Ellen von Unwerth
Girls Enjoying Life Photography by Ellen von Unwerth
The Body in Movement
Alluring Freedom
The Body in Movement
Alluring Freedom
The Body in Movement
Alluring Freedom
The Body in Movement
Alluring Freedom
The Body in Movement
Girls Enjoying Life
The Body in Movement
Girls Enjoying Life
The Body in Movement
Girls Enjoying Life
The Body in Movement
Girls Enjoying Life
The Body in Movement
Girls Enjoying Life
Alluring Freedom
Girls Enjoying Life
Alluring Freedom
Girls Enjoying Life
Alluring Freedom
Girls Enjoying Life
Photography by Ellen von Unwerth
Photography by Ellen von Unwerth
Photography by Ellen von Unwerth
Photography by Ellen von Unwerth
Photography by Ellen von Unwerth
Photography by Ellen von Unwerth
Photography by Ellen von Unwerth
Photography by Ellen von Unwerth
Photography by Ellen von Unwerth
Photography by Ellen von Unwerth
Photography by Ellen von Unwerth
Photography by Ellen von Unwerth
Alluring Freedom
Photography by Ellen von Unwerth
Photography by Ellen von Unwerth
Photography by Ellen von Unwerth
Photography by Ellen von Unwerth
Photography by Ellen von Unwerth
Photography by Ellen von Unwerth
Photography by Ellen von Unwerth
Photography by Ellen von Unwerth
Photography by Ellen von Unwerth
Photography by Ellen von Unwerth
Photography by Ellen von Unwerth
Photography by Ellen von Unwerth
Photography by Ellen von Unwerth
The Body in Movement
Alluring Freedom
Photography by Ellen von Unwerth
Photography by Ellen von Unwerth
The Body in Movement
Alluring Freedom
The Body in Movement
Alluring Freedom
The Body in Movement
Girls Enjoying Life
The Body in Movement
Girls Enjoying Life
Photography by Ellen von Unwerth
Photography by Ellen von Unwerth
Photography by Ellen von Unwerth
Photography by Ellen von Unwerth
The Body in Movement Photography by Ellen von Unwerth
The Body in Movement Photography by Ellen von Unwerth
Alluring Freedom Photography by Ellen von Unwerth
Alluring Freedom P hot ogra p hy by Ellen von U nwerth
Alluring Freedom Photography by Ellen von Unwerth
Photography by Ellen von Unwerth
Photography by Ellen von Unwerth
Photography by Ellen von Unwerth
Photography by Ellen von U nw erth
Girls Enjoying Life Photography by Ellen von Unwerth
Girls Enjoying Life Photography by Ellen von Unwerth
Girls Enjoying Life Photography by Ellen von Unwerth
Girls Enjoying Life Photography by Ellen von Unwerth
Girls Enjoying Life Photography by Ellen von Unwerth
What are the advantages of a multiple column grid.? Grids keep elements aligned and organized, make type easier to read, they make it easier to make designs balanced and consistent, make spreads consistent, add/easier to create visual hierarchy. How many characters is optimal for a line length? words per line? 50-75 characters. 9-12 words. Why is the baseline grid used in design? It is where the type sits. What are reasons to set type justified? ragged (unjustified)? Justified type, when done right, can look symetrical and geometric; characters fill a full line/text box. Ragged text is easier to read, creates a better type texture and color. What is a typographic river? spaces in a body of text that go through the whole text box What does clothesline, hangline or flow line mean? Horizontally aligns to text and allows for easy readability/flow What is type color/texture mean? How light or dark the way a typeface in a text box creates. They can be fuzzy and dazzle based on spacing, size, leading, etc. How does x-height effect type color? A higher x-height makes a text color longer and lighter while a shorter x-height creates a shorter and darker type color. What are some ways to indicate a new paragraph. Are there any rules? Drop caps, bold, color, italic, symbols, indention, weight, space, etc.
A lot of these covers have a nice, mostly minimal, use of typography which looks very clean and cool. I think the ones that use shapes with type inside them add a nice extra layer of dimension to the design. I like the ones that have a layer of white space outside the photo as well, I think it is a nice way to showcase photos without making them the whole cover.
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Girls Enjoy
Photography Ellen von U
Written by Rebecca
ls oying Life
phy by n Unwerth
Rebecca Rapp
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“But you see so many images that are dark and depressing at the moment. All these sad women being sad! So I figured, let’s show girls having fun and enjoying life.”
Ellen von Unwerth is one of the most
glamour has led her to work for some of
my childhood as being fairly happy”.
for Bravo, a popular German teen magazine.
influential fashion photographers alive
the world’s most renowned publications
This ability to remain upbeat has served
It went well and she soon moved to Paris,
today. Her unmistakable aesthetic blends
and luxurious brands.
her well throughout her career and has
working with influential photographers such
beautiful women, eroticism and a sense
Born in 1954 in Frankfurt, Germany,
become entrenched, stylistically, in her
as Guy Bourdin and Oliviero Toscani. She
of playfulness with consummate skill.
von Unwerth experienced a tough and
photography. Von Unwerth encourages
felt that a model was restricted to listening
Her ability to get more from her subjects
testing childhood. At the age of two she
her models to showcase their personalities:
orders regarding her poses. Hence she held a
helps her to create alternate realities
tragically lost both her parents and spent
they come across as happy and engaging;
camera and decided to work behind it since
where things are just that little bit more
many years moving around orphanages
the antithesis of the unobtainable trophies
she had gained experience in the field. With
free and fun. Her hedonistic teenage
and foster homes in the city. Despite
portrayed by many of her contemporaries.
this step, she could let the models show some
years spent between circus tents and
this turbulent upbringing, von Unwerth
Her desire to showcase confidence and
creativity in poses. At this time she was being
hippie communes remain a big aesthet-
recalls that she had a positive outlook on
character can be traced back to her time
given essential insight about photography by a
ic influence and she draws upon these
life as far back as she can remember. In
as a professional model, a career she
photographer whom she was living with. Only
experiences to weave narrative into her
her book, Fräulein, she recalls that she
fell into by pure chance. After being
after a few years, she came in to the light by
photography. Her ability to perfectly
had a sunny disposition. “I didn’t suffer
spotted by a talent scout at university in
doing a shoot for GUESS, Claudia Schiffer as
balance escapism with a sense of timeless
too much,” she said. “In fact, I remember
Munich, she was asked to do a trial shoot
the model. Works by Von Unwerth have been 5
LUST
featured in magazines, such as Vanity Fair,
this know-how and are on the other end
ing editorial pages for famous magazines.
The Face, i-D, Interview, Twill, Arena
of the bridge. Ellen Von Unwerth did not
Additionally, she has made commercials
and Vogue. In 1991, she received first
like the static positions of models, having
and music videos. Hence she is not just a
prize at the International Festival of
to stand in a single pose for a really long
photographer but a director who specializ-
Fashion Photography.
time, so she reversed this culture at least
es in femininity with eroticism.
By 1998, the American Photo Magazine
in her photography. She promoted playful,
Like so many of her passions, von
listed her among the Most Important
kinetic and progressing gestures and poses
Unwerth’s introduction to photography
People in Photography. Since this time,
in a model.
occurred by happy accident. Her fixation
she has been on the radar as being among
Since the beginning of her career as an
began after a boyfriend at the time gave
the best female photographers with a
adult, she has been photographing or has
her a camera as a gift. After a brief lesson
natural talent to capture the sensuality of
been the subject of photography herself. In
on the camera’s technical operation, she
women. She was lucky that she experi-
the industry, she is noted for her fashion
was soon photographing her friends and
enced modeling herself and this part of her
photography because she pushes the limits
the places she travelled to through work.
career aids her in understanding models’
female sexuality in photography in general
What started out as a hobby turned into
minds, unlike photographers who lack
and in fashion. She has created outstand-
obsession after Jill, a cult French fashion
magazine from the early ’80s, published
when she shot an advertising campaign
view of sexuality. It exuded the necessary
some of her travel shots of a trip to Kenya.
for Guess with a German model, Claudia
sophistication and opulence required for
She was soon contributing images to them
Schiffer. The sensual, sophisticated imag-
the glossy magazines, but underneath the
on a regular basis.
ery was a departure for von Unwerth but
surface was a suggestive irreverence that
Her early photography featured plenty
the shoot would transform the fortunes of
fitted the feel of the early ’90s perfectly.
of movement and energy and her mix of
both women. It was widely seen as the moment
Over the next 20 years, she continued
spontaneity and classical glamour soon
the world was made aware of Schiffer, who would
to shoot powerful, intimate images of
attracted many admirers, including British
go on to become one of the most successful
women for clients such as Playboy, Vanity
designer Katharine Hamnett. Seeing her
supermodels of all time.
Fair, GQ, Vogue and Agent Provocateur.
early images in Jill, Hamnett offered
This shoot announced von Unwerth to the
Always choosing to focus on a model’s
her work shooting an advertising cam-
fashion world and subsequently landed her
personality and sense of fun, her stylized
paign in 1989 and the resulting black
a job shooting for Vogue Italia in 1990. As
photography managed to balance art and
and white images continued her street
her reputation grew, her style developed.
fantasy with sadomasochistic themes to
and reportage style.
She blended the glamorous eroticism of
create visceral, eye-catching imagery.
Later that year, she received her big break
Helmut Newton with a uniquely feminine
There are many reoccurring themes in von 7
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Unwerth’s work and a lot of her imagery
a creative community began to emerge
Bazaar editorial in 2015, feature the big
tends to focus of the dual ideas of freedom
and this new group of people piqued her
top as a backdrop. For von Unwerth, the
and transformation. Although these
interest in unusual and non-conformist
circus is a succinct visual metaphor, a
powerful motifs are prominent throughout
behavior. Although she didn’t realize it
subtle way to tell stories of escapism,
her career, they can be traced back to her
yet, the experiences she had during this
freedom and transformation.
formative teenage years.
time would become a central theme in
Although widely known for her work in
Soon after leaving foster care, von Unw-
her later photography.
fashion, von Unwerth has also managed
erth relocated to Oberstdorf, a small town
This love of the alternative lifestyle was
to establish herself as an internationally
high up in the mountains to the south
further cemented when she began work
renowned photographer across a range of
east of Munich. She and several friends
at a circus in Munich in the early ’80s.
subject matters. Early in her career, she
started a hippie commune in an old
Although it was only a brief period of
merged her love of photography and music
farmhouse; she said of the time that “it
employment, the bright lights, vibrant vi-
when she shot promotional imagery for
was here that I started to enjoy my life.”
suals and elaborate costumes stylistically
British band Duran Duran’s 1990 album,
With artists, performers and musicians
significant in her later work. Many of her
Liberty. She would continue to work with
from all over Europe passing through,
most enduring shoots, including a Harper’s
the group over the next decade, shooting
album covers and tour posters and even
match, with the effervescent Rihanna taking
stones of modern fashion advertising. Her
directing the video to their single, “Elec-
little persuading from von Unwerth to showcase
inimitable use of sensual imagery has
tric Barbarella”.
her coquettish and playful side.
not only led to commercial and artistic
As she established a reputation for herself,
In a career that has spanned well over 25
success, but, in a broader sense, it
many more musicians sought her artistic
years, Ellen von Unwerth has dramatically
has altered the way female sexuality is
guidance. Albums for Janet Jackson,
helped shape the way women are por-
represented within fashion.
Bananarama, All Saints, Britney Spears
trayed on camera. Working in a profession
“It’s not special any more to be a pho-
and Christina Aguilera soon followed. She
dominated by men, her unique approach
tographer,” she says. “Even when I
has also worked extensively with Rihanna,
to displaying sexuality has broken with
take a picture, everybody stands next
most notably shooting the covers of both
convention and paved the way for many
to me and takes the same picture. Five
Rated R and Talk That Talk.
female photographers.
minutes later it’s on everyone else’s Insta-
The relationship has since developed, with
As well as striking a different path to her
gram and I’m old news – so I’m forced to
the two working together on several pho-
male counterparts, her photography man-
take pictures on my iPhone too.”
toshoots, including a notorious GQ cover
ages to capture the very essence of desire,
She tells me she can usually tell the
story in 2014. The pair seem to be a perfect
eroticism and pleasure – three corner-
difference between a photograph a man 9
LUST
has taken and one a woman has taken.
giggles in Bavaria. Von Unwerth motions
one of her assistants calls me to make sure
“But I find it crazy how women photo-
towards an image of three women topless
that I don’t think it’s pornographic.)
graph themselves all the time. When I
on a sled: “This model is Miss Russia and
Of course, the word I should have reached
was a girl and looked in the mirror, my
she brought a lot of vodka to the shoot. So
for was erotic. Or perhaps simply German.
stepmother would come in and give me a
they were drinking behind my back in the
“Look at the scandal there was with Janet
slap. There was this idea that if you did
snow.” Von Unwerth is not much given
Jackson over here,” she says referring to
that, the devil would get in you and steal
to analysing. When I allude to the “male
the Super Bowl nipple slip of 2004. “It
your personality. Now everyone does this.
gaze” she has no idea what I’m talking
was a boob! It’s something you should be
I ask models sometimes, ‘Do you have
about. When I find myself grasping for
proud of and not hide. Especially if it’s
to take so many selfies?’ And they say:
the word “pornography” she shoots back:
nice. Ha ha ha ha! In Germany it is not
‘Only when I take selfies do I get likes.’
“Have you ever seen a porno?” Well, one
like this. Even if you go to a park in Berlin
It’s sad! Narcissism is so celebrated in
of your pictures does literally depict two
in the summer, everybody is naked and
our society, sometimes people lose inter-
people having sex in a hayloft. “It’s more
playing frisbee. You would get arrested if
est in other people.”
inspired by a B-movie sense of camp. I
you did that in LA.”
It is clear that everyone had a whole lot of
wouldn’t say porno.” (After our interview,
“When somebody’s not moving I get bored. I take two pictures and I say: ‘Great, I have it now.’ But I love the body in movement. I like the nude body in movement.”
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LUST
Alluring
Photography by Ellen von Unwerth
Freedom Written by Rebecca Rapp
Ellen von Unwerth is one of the most influential fashion photographers alive today. Her unmistakable aesthetic blends beautiful women, eroticism and a sense of playfulness with consummate skill. Her ability to get more from her subjects helps her to create alternate realities where things are just that little bit more free and fun. Her hedonistic teenage years spent between circus tents and hippie communes remain a big aesthetic influence and she draws upon these experiences to weave narrative into her photography. Her ability to perfectly balance escapism with a sense of timeless glamour has led her to work for some of the world’s most renowned publications and luxurious brands.
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“I think that the obsession with technique is a male thing. I would rather search for a new model or location.�
Born in 1954 in Frankfurt, Germany, von Unwerth experienced a tough and testing childhood. At the age of two she tragically lost both her parents and spent many years moving around orphanages and foster homes in the city. Despite this turbulent upbringing, von Unwerth recalls that she had a positive outlook on life as far back as she can remember. In her book, Fräulein, she recalls that she had a sunny disposition. “I didn’t suffer too much,” she said. “In fact, I remember my childhood as being fairly happy”. This ability to remain upbeat has served her well throughout her career and has become entrenched, stylistically, in her photography. Von Unwerth encourages her models to showcase their personalities: they come across as happy and engaging; the antithesis of the unobtainable trophies portrayed by many of her contemporaries. Her desire to showcase confidence and character can be traced back to her time as a professional model, a career she fell into by pure chance. After being spotted by a talent scout at university in Munich, she was asked to do a trial shoot for Bravo, a popular German teen magazine. It went well and she soon moved to Paris, working with influential photographers such as Guy Bourdin and Oliviero Toscani. She felt that a model was restricted to listening orders regarding her poses. Hence she held a camera and decided to work behind it since she had gained experience in the field. With this step, she could let the models show some creativity in poses. At this time she was being given essential insight about photography by a photographer whom she was living with. Only after a few years, she came in to the light by doing a shoot for GUESS, Claudia Schiffer as the model. Works by Von Unwerth have been featured in magazines, such as Vanity Fair, The Face, i-D, Interview, Twill, Arena and Vogue. In 1991, she received first prize at the International Festival of Fashion Photography. By 1998, the American Photo Magazine listed her among the Most Important People in Photography. Since this time, she has been on the radar as being among the best female photographers with a natural talent to capture the sensuality of women. She was lucky that she experienced modeling herself and this part of her career aids her in understanding models’ minds, unlike photographers who lack this know-how and are on the other end of the bridge. Ellen Von Unwerth did not like the static positions of models, having to stand in a single pose for a really long time, so she reversed this culture at least in her photography. She promoted playful, kinetic and progressing gestures and poses in a model. Since the beginning of her career as an adult, she has been photographing or has been the subject of photography herself. In the industry, she is noted for her fashion photography because she pushes the limits female sexuality in photography in general and in fashion. She has created outstanding editorial pages for famous magazines. Additionally, she has made commercials and music videos. Hence she is not just a photographer but a
15
LUST
director who specializes in femininity with eroticism. Like so many of her passions, von Unwerth’s introduction to photography occurred by happy accident. Her fixation began after a boyfriend at the time gave her a camera as a gift. After a brief lesson on the camera’s technical operation, she was soon photographing her friends and the places she travelled to through work. What started out as a hobby turned into obsession after Jill, a cult French fashion magazine from the early ’80s, published some of her travel shots of a trip to Kenya. She was soon contributing images to them on a regular basis. Her early photography featured plenty of movement and energy and her mix of spontaneity and classical glamour soon attracted many admirers, including British designer Katharine Hamnett. Seeing her early images in Jill, Hamnett offered her work shooting an advertising campaign in 1989 and the resulting black and white images continued her street and reportage style. Later that year, she received her big break when she shot an advertising campaign for Guess with a German model, Claudia Schiffer. The sensual, sophisticated imagery was a departure for von Unwerth but the shoot would transform the fortunes of both women. It was widely seen as the moment the world was made aware of Schiffer, who would go on to become one of the most successful supermodels of all time. This shoot announced von Unwerth to the fashion world and subsequently landed her a job shooting for Vogue Italia in 1990. As her reputation grew, her style developed. She blended the glamorous eroticism of Helmut Newton with a uniquely feminine view of
sexuality. It exuded the necessary sophistication and opulence required for the glossy magazines, but underneath the surface was a suggestive irreverence that fitted the feel of the early ’90s perfectly. Over the next 20 years, she continued to shoot powerful, intimate images of women for clients such as Playboy, Vanity Fair, GQ, Vogue and Agent Provocateur. Always choosing to focus on a model’s personality and sense of fun, her stylized photography managed to balance art and fantasy with sadomasochistic themes to create visceral, eye-catching imagery. There are many reoccurring themes in von Unwerth’s work and a lot of her imagery tends to focus of the dual ideas of freedom and transformation. Although these powerful motifs are prominent throughout her career, they can be traced back to her formative teenage years. Soon after leaving foster care, von Unwerth relocated to Oberstdorf, a small town high up in the mountains to the south east of Munich. She and several friends started a hippie commune in an old farmhouse; she said of the time that “it was here that I started to enjoy my life.” With artists, performers and musicians from all over Europe passing through, a creative community began to emerge and this new group of people piqued her interest in unusual and non-conformist behavior. Although she didn’t realize it yet, the experiences she had during this time would become a central theme in her later photography. This love of the alternative lifestyle was further cemented when she began work at a circus in Munich in the early ’80s. Although it was only a brief period of employment, the bright lights, vibrant visuals and elaborate costumes
17
LUST
stylistically significant in her later work. Many of her
As she established a reputation for herself, many more
most enduring shoots, including a Harper’s Bazaar edito-
musicians sought her artistic guidance. Albums for Janet
rial in 2015, feature the big top as a backdrop. F o r v o n
Jackson, Bananarama, All Saints, Britney Spears and
Un we r th , th e ci r cu s i s a su cci n ct v i su al me ta-
Christina Aguilera soon followed. She has also worked
ph or, a su b tl e way to te l l stor i e s of e scapi sm,
extensively with Rihanna, most notably shooting the
f r e e d om an d tr an sf o r mati on .
covers of both Rated R and Talk That Talk.
Although widely known for her work in fashion, von
The relationship has since developed, with the two
Unwerth has also managed to establish herself as an
working together on several photoshoots, including a
internationally renowned photographer across a range of
notorious GQ cover story in 2014. The pair seem to be a
subject matters. Early in her career, she merged her love
perfect match, with the effervescent Rihanna taking little
of photography and music when she shot promotional
persuading from von Unwerth to showcase her coquett-
imagery for British band Duran Duran’s 1990 album,
ish and playful side.
Liberty. She would continue to work with the group over the
In a career that has spanned well over 25 years, Ellen
next decade, shooting album covers and tour posters and
von Unwerth has dramatically helped shape the way
even directing the video to their single, “Electric Barbarella”.
women are portrayed on camera. Working in a profession
She tells me she can usually tell the difference between a photograph a man has taken and one a woman has taken. “But I find it crazy how women photograph themselves all the time. When I was a girl and looked in the mirror, my stepmother would come in and give me a slap. There was this idea that if you did that, the devil would get in you and steal your personality. Now everyone does this. I ask models sometimes, ‘Do you have to take so many selfies?’ And they say: ‘Only when I take selfies do I get likes.’ It’s sad! Narcissism is so celebrated in our society, sometimes people lose interest in other people.” It is clear that everyone had a whole lot of giggles in Bavaria. Von Unwerth motions towards an image of three women topless on a sled: “This model is Miss Russia and she brought a lot of vodka to the shoot. So they were drinking behind my back in the snow.” Von Unwerth is not much given to analysing. When I allude to the “male gaze” she has no idea what I’m talking about. When I find myself grasping for the word “pornography” she shoots back: “Have you ever seen a porno?” Well, one of your pictures does literally depict two people having sex in a hayloft. “It’s more inspired by a B-movie sense of camp. dominated by men, her unique approach to displaying sexuality has broken with convention and paved the way for many female photographers. As well as striking a different path to her male counterparts, her photography manages to capture the very essence of desire, eroticism and pleasure – three cornerstones of modern fashion advertising. Her inimitable use of sensual imagery has not only led to commercial and artistic success, but, in a broader sense, it has altered the way female sexuality is represented within fashion. “It’s not special any more to be a photographer,” she says.
I wouldn’t say porno.” (After our interview, one of her assistants calls me to make sure that I don’t think it’s pornographic.) Of course, the word I should have reached for was erotic. Or perhaps simply German. “Look at the scandal there was with Janet Jackson over here,” she says referring to the Super Bowl nipple slip of 2004. “It was a boob! It’s something you should be proud of and not hide. Especially if it’s nice. Ha ha ha ha! In Germany it is not like this. Even if you go to a park in Berlin in the summer, everybody is naked and playing frisbee. You would get arrested if you did that in LA.”
“Even when I take a picture, everybody stands next to me and takes the same picture. Five minutes later it’s on everyone else’s Instagram and I’m old news – so I’m forced to take pictures on my iPhone too.” 19
Magazine LUST Name
Girls Enjoying Life Photography by Ellen von Unwerth
“When somebody’s not moving I get bored. I take two pictures and I say: ‘Great, I have it now.’ But I love the body in movement. I like the nude body in movement.”
Written by Rebecca Rapp
fe
h
21
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Ellen von Unwerth
is one of the most influential fashion photog-
raphers alive today. Her unmistakable aesthetic blends beautiful women, eroticism and a sense of playfulness with consummate skill. Her ability to get more from her subjects helps her to create alternate realities where things are just that little bit more free and fun. Her hedonistic teenage years spent between circus tents and hippie communes remain a big aesthetic influence and she draws upon these experiences to weave narrative into her photography. Her ability to perfectly balance escapism with a sense of timeless glamour has led her to work for some of the world’s most renowned publications and luxurious brands. Born in 1954 in Frankfurt, Germany, von Unwerth experienced a tough and testing childhood. At the age of two she tragically lost both her parents and spent many years moving around orphanages and foster homes in the city. Despite this turbulent upbringing, von Unwerth recalls that she had a positive outlook on life as far back as she can remember. In her book, Fräulein, she recalls that she had a sunny disposition. “I didn’t suffer too much,” she said. “In fact, I remember my childhood as being fairly happy”. This ability to remain upbeat has served her well throughout her career and has become entrenched, stylistically, in her photography. Von Unwerth encourages her models to showcase their personalities: they come across as happy and engaging; the antithesis of the unobtainable trophies portrayed by many of her contemporaries. Her desire to showcase confidence and character can be traced back to her time as a professional model, a career she fell into by pure chance. After being spotted by a talent scout at university in Munich, she was asked to do a trial shoot for Bravo, a popular German teen magazine. It went well and she soon moved to Paris, working with influential photographers such as Guy Bourdin and Oliviero Toscani. She felt that a model was restricted to listening orders regarding her poses. Hence she held a camera and decided to work behind it since she had gained experience in the field. With this step, she could let the models show some creativity in poses. At this time she was being given essential insight about photography by a photographer whom she was living with. Only after a few years, she came in to the light by doing a shoot for GUESS, Claudia Schiffer as the model. Works by Von Unwerth have been featured in magazines, such as Vanity Fair, The Face, i-D, Interview, Twill, Arena and Vogue. In 1991, she received first prize at the International Festival of Fashion Photography. By 1998, the American Photo Magazine listed her among the Most Important People in Photography. Since this time, she has been on the radar as being among the best female photographers with a natural talent to capture the sensuality of women. She was lucky that she experienced modeling herself and this part of her career aids her in understanding models’ minds, unlike photographers who lack this know-how and are on the other end of the bridge. Ellen Von Unwerth did not like the static positions of models, having to stand in a single pose for a really long time, so she reversed this culture at least in her photography. She promoted playful, kinetic and progressing gestures and poses in a model. Since the beginning of her career as an adult, she has been photographing or has been the subject of photography herself. In the industry, she is noted for her fashion photography because she pushes the limits female sexuality in photography in general and in fashion. She has created outstanding editorial pages for famous magazines. Additionally, she has made commercials and music videos. Hence she is not just a photographer but a director who specializes in femininity with eroticism. Like so many of her passions, von Unwerth’s introduction to photography occurred by happy accident. Her fixation began after a boyfriend at the time gave her a camera as a gift. After a brief lesson on the camera’s technical operation, she was soon photographing her friends and the places she travelled to through work. What started out as a hobby turned into obsession after Jill, a cult French fashion magazine from the early ’80s, published some of her travel shots of a trip to Kenya. She was soon contributing images to them on a regular basis. Her early photography featured plenty of movement and energy and her mix of spontaneity and classical glamour soon attracted many admirers, including British designer Katharine Hamnett. Seeing her early images in Jill, Hamnett offered her work shooting an advertising campaign in 1989 and the resulting black and white images continued her street and reportage style. Later that year, she received her big break when she shot an advertising campaign for Guess with a German model, Claudia Schiffer. The sensual, sophisticated imagery was a departure for von Unwerth but the shoot would transform the fortunes of both women. It was widely seen as the moment the world was made aware of Schiffer, who would go on to become one of the most successful supermodels of all time. This shoot announced von Unwerth to the fashion world and subsequently landed her a job shooting for Vogue Italia in 1990. As her reputation grew, her style developed. She blended the glamorous eroticism of Helmut Newton with a uniquely feminine view of sexuality. It exuded the necessary sophistication and opulence required for the glossy magazines, but underneath the surface was a suggestive irreverence that fitted the feel of the early ’90s perfectly. Over the next 20 years, she continued to shoot powerful, intimate images of women for clients such as Playboy, Vanity Fair, GQ, Vogue and Agent Provocateur. Always choosing to focus on a model’s personality and sense of fun, her stylized photography managed to balance art and fantasy with sadomasochistic themes to create visceral, eye-catching imagery.
23
Magazine LUST Name
“But you see so many images that are dark and depressing at the moment. All these sad women being sad! So I figured, let’s show girls having fun and enjoying life.�
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There are many reoccurring themes in von Unwerth’s work and a lot of her imagery tends to focus of the dual ideas of freedom and transformation. Although these powerful motifs are prominent throughout her career, they can be traced back to her formative teenage years. Soon after leaving foster care, von Unwerth relocated to Oberstdorf, a small town high up in the mountains to the south east of Munich. She and several friends started a hippie commune in an old farmhouse; she said of the time that “it was here that I started to enjoy my life.” With artists, performers and musicians from all over Europe passing through, a creative community began to emerge and this new group of people piqued her interest in unusual and non-conformist behavior. Although she didn’t realize it yet, the experiences she had during this time would become a central theme in her later photography. This love of the alternative lifestyle was further cemented when she began work at a circus in Munich in the early ’80s. Although it was only a brief period of employment, the bright lights, vibrant visuals and elaborate costumes stylistically significant in her later work. Many of her most enduring shoots, including a Harper’s Bazaar editorial in 2015, feature the big top as a backdrop. For von Unwerth, the circus is a succinct visual metaphor, a subtle way to tell stories of escapism, freedom and transformation. Although widely known for her work in fashion, von Unwerth has also managed to establish herself as an internationally renowned photographer across a range of subject matters. Early in her career, she merged her love of photography and music when she shot promotional imagery for British band Duran Duran’s 1990 album, Liberty. She would continue to work with the group over the next decade, shooting album covers and tour posters and even directing the video to their single, “Electric Barbarella”. As she established a reputation for herself, many more musicians sought her artistic guidance. Albums for Janet Jackson, Bananarama, All Saints, Britney Spears and Christina Aguilera soon followed. She has also worked extensively with Rihanna, most notably shooting the covers of both Rated R and Talk That Talk. The relationship has since developed, with the two working together on several photoshoots, including a notorious GQ cover story in 2014. The pair seem to be a perfect match, with the effervescent Rihanna taking little persuading from von Unwerth to showcase her coquettish and playful side. In a career that has spanned well over 25 years, Ellen von Unwerth has dramatically helped shape the way women are portrayed on camera. Working in a profession dominated by men, her unique approach to displaying sexuality has broken with convention and paved the way for many female photographers. As well as striking a different path to her male counterparts, her photography manages to capture the very essence of desire, eroticism and pleasure – three cornerstones of modern fashion advertising. Her inimitable use of sensual imagery has not only led to commercial and artistic success, but, in a broader sense, it has altered the way female sexuality is represented within fashion. “It’s not special any more to be a photographer,” she says. “Even when I take a picture, everybody stands next to me and takes the same picture. Five minutes later it’s on everyone else’s Instagram and I’m old news – so I’m forced to take pictures on my iPhone too.” She tells me she can usually tell the difference between a photograph a man has taken and one a woman has taken. “But I find it crazy how women photograph themselves all the time. When I was a girl and looked in the mirror, my stepmother would come in and give me a slap. There was this idea that if you did that, the devil would get in you and steal your personality. Now everyone does this. I ask models sometimes, ‘Do you have to take so many selfies?’ And they say: ‘Only when I take selfies do I get likes.’ It’s sad! Narcissism is so celebrated in our society, sometimes people lose interest in other people.” It is clear that everyone had a whole lot of giggles in Bavaria. Von Unwerth motions towards an image of three women topless on a sled: “This model is Miss Russia and she brought a lot of vodka to the shoot. So they were drinking behind my back in the snow.” Von Unwerth is not much given to analysing. When I allude to the “male gaze” she has no idea what I’m talking about. When I find myself grasping for the word “pornography” she shoots back: “Have you ever seen a porno?” Well, one of your pictures does literally depict two people having sex in a hayloft. “It’s more inspired by a B-movie sense of camp. I wouldn’t say porno.” (After our interview, one of her assistants calls me to make sure that I don’t think it’s pornographic.) Of course, the word I should have reached for was erotic. Or perhaps simply German. “Look at the scandal there was with Janet Jackson over here,” she says referring to the Super Bowl nipple slip of 2004. “It was a boob! It’s something you should be proud of and not hide. Especially if it’s nice. Ha ha ha ha! In Germany it is not like this. Even if you go to a park in Berlin in the summer, everybody is naked and playing frisbee. You would get arrested if you did that in LA.”
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Alluring
Photography by Ellen von Unwerth
Freedom Written by Rebecca Rapp
Ellen von Unwerth is one of the most influential fashion photographers alive today. Her unmistakable aesthetic blends beautiful women, eroticism and a sense of playfulness with consummate skill. Her ability to get more from her subjects helps her to create alternate realities where things are just that little bit more free and fun. Her hedonistic teenage years spent between circus tents and hippie communes remain a big aesthetic influence and she draws upon these experiences to weave narrative into her photography. Her ability to perfectly balance escapism with a sense of timeless glamour has led her to work for some of the world’s most renowned publications and luxurious brands.
Ellen von Unwerth for Royalty Fame
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“I think that the obsession with technique is a male thing. I would rather search for a new model or location.�
Born in 1954 in Frankfurt, Germany, von Unwerth experienced a tough and testing childhood. At the age of two she tragically lost both her parents and spent many years moving around orphanages and foster homes in the city. Despite this turbulent upbringing, von Unwerth recalls that she had a positive outlook on life as far back as she can remember. In her book, Fräulein, she recalls that she had a sunny disposition. “I didn’t suffer too much,” she said. “In fact, I remember my childhood as being fairly happy”. This ability to remain upbeat has served her well throughout her career and has become entrenched, stylistically, in her photography. Von Unwerth encourages her models to showcase their personalities: they come across as happy and engaging; the antithesis of the unobtainable trophies portrayed by many of her contemporaries. Her desire to showcase confidence and character can be traced back to her time as a professional model, a career she fell into by pure chance. After being spotted by a talent scout at university in Munich, she was asked to do a trial shoot for Bravo, a popular German teen magazine. It went well and she soon moved to Paris, working with influential photographers such as Guy Bourdin and Oliviero Toscani. She felt that a model was restricted to listening orders regarding her poses. Hence she held a camera and decided to work behind it since she had gained experience in the field. With this step, she could let the models show some creativity in poses. At this time she was being given essential insight about photography by a photographer whom she was living with. Only after a few years, she came in to the light by doing a shoot for GUESS, Claudia Schiffer as the model. Works by Von Unwerth have been featured in magazines, such as Vanity Fair, The Face, i-D, Interview, Twill, Arena and Vogue. In 1991, she received first prize at the International Festival of Fashion Photography. By 1998, the American Photo Magazine listed her among the Most Important People in Photography. Since this time, she has been on the radar as being among the best female photographers with a natural talent to capture the sensuality of women. She was lucky that she experienced modeling herself and this part of her career aids her in understanding models’ minds, unlike photographers who lack this know-how and are on the other end of the bridge. Ellen Von Unwerth did not like the static positions of models, having to stand in a single pose for a really long time, so she reversed this culture at least Claudia Schiffer 2102 Ellen von Unwerth. September 2012
in her photography. She promoted playful, kinetic and progressing gestures and poses in a model. Since the beginning of her career as an adult, she has been photographing or has been the subject of photography herself. In the industry, she is noted for her fashion photography because she pushes the limits female sexuality in photography in general and in fashion. She has created outstanding editorial pages for famous magazines. Additionally, she has made commercials and music videos. Hence she is not just a photographer but a
31
LUST
director who specializes in femininity with eroticism. Like so many of her passions, von Unwerth’s introduction to photography occurred by happy accident. Her fixation began after a boyfriend at the time gave her a camera as a gift. After a brief lesson on the camera’s technical operation, she was soon photographing her friends and the places she travelled to through work. What started out as a hobby turned into obsession after Jill, a cult French fashion magazine from the early ’80s, published some of her travel shots of a trip to Kenya. She was soon contributing images to them on a regular basis. Her early photography featured plenty of movement and energy and her mix of spontaneity and classical glamour soon attracted many admirers, including British designer Katharine Hamnett. Seeing her early images in Jill, Hamnett offered her work shooting an advertising campaign in 1989 and the resulting black and white images continued her street and reportage style. Later that year, she received her big break when she shot an advertising campaign for Guess with a German model, Claudia Schiffer. The sensual, sophisticated imagery was a departure for von Unwerth but the shoot would transform the fortunes of both women. It was widely seen as the moment the world was made aware of Schiffer, who would go on to become one of the most successful supermodels of all time. This shoot announced von Unwerth to the fashion world and subsequently landed her a job shooting for Vogue Italia in 1990. As her reputation grew, her style developed. She blended the glamorous eroticism of Helmut Newton with a uniquely feminine view of
Ellen Von Unwerth For Chantal Thomass Lingerie Spring/Summer 2014
sexuality. It exuded the necessary sophistication and opulence required for the glossy magazines, but underneath the surface was a suggestive irreverence that fitted the feel of the early ’90s perfectly. Over the next 20 years, she continued to shoot powerful, intimate images of women for clients such as Playboy, Vanity Fair, GQ, Vogue and Agent Provocateur. Always choosing to focus on a model’s personality and sense of fun, her stylized photography managed to balance art and fantasy with sadomasochistic themes to create visceral, eye-catching imagery. There are many reoccurring themes in von Unwerth’s work and a lot of her imagery tends to focus of the dual ideas of freedom and transformation. Although these powerful motifs are prominent throughout her career, they can be traced back to her formative teenage years. Soon after leaving foster care, von Unwerth relocated to Oberstdorf, a small town high up in the mountains to the south east of Munich. She and several friends started a hippie commune in an old farmhouse; she said of the time that “it was here that I started to enjoy my life.” With artists, performers and musicians from all over Europe passing through, a creative community began to emerge and this new group of people piqued her interest in unusual and non-conformist behavior. Although she didn’t realize it yet, the experiences she had during this time would become a central theme in her later photography. This love of the alternative lifestyle was further cemented when she began work at a circus in Munich in the early ’80s. Although it was only a brief period of employment, the bright lights, vibrant visuals and elaborate costumes
33
Magazine Name LUST
stylistically significant in her later work. Many of her
all the time. When I was a girl and looked in the mirror,
most enduring shoots, including a Harper’s Bazaar edito-
my stepmother would come in and give me a slap. There
rial in 2015, feature the big top as a backdrop. F o r v o n
was this idea that if you did that, the devil would get in
U nwert h, th e ci r cu s i s a su cci n ct v i su al me ta-
you and steal your personality. Now everyone does this.
phor, a s u b tl e way to te l l stor i e s of e scapi sm,
I ask models sometimes, ‘Do you have to take so many
f reedom a n d tr an sf or mati o n .
selfies?’ And they say: ‘Only when I take selfies do I get
Although widely known for her work in fashion, von
likes.’ It’s sad! Narcissism is so celebrated in our society,
Unwerth has also managed to establish herself as an
sometimes people lose interest in other people.”
internationally renowned photographer across a range of
It is clear that everyone had a whole lot of giggles in
subject matters. Early in her career, she merged her love
Bavaria. Von Unwerth motions towards an image of three
of photography and music when she shot promotional
women topless on a sled: “This model is Miss Russia and
imagery for British band Duran Duran’s 1990 album,
she brought a lot of vodka to the shoot. So they were
Liberty. She would continue to work with the group over the
drinking behind my back in the snow.” Von Unwerth is
next decade, shooting album covers and tour posters and
not much given to analysing. When I allude to the “male
even directing the video to their single, “Electric Barbarella”.
gaze” she has no idea what I’m talking about. When I find
As she established a reputation for herself, many more
myself grasping for the word “pornography” she shoots
musicians sought her artistic guidance. Albums for Janet
back: “Have you ever seen a porno?” Well, one of your
Jackson, Bananarama, All Saints, Britney Spears and
pictures does literally depict two people having sex in a
Christina Aguilera soon followed. She has also worked
hayloft. “It’s more inspired by a B-movie sense of camp.
extensively with Rihanna, most notably shooting the
I wouldn’t say porno.” (After our interview, one of her assis-
covers of both Rated R and Talk That Talk.
tants calls me to make sure that I don’t think it’s pornographic.)
The relationship has since developed, with the two
Of course, the word I should have reached for was erotic.
working together on several photoshoots, including a
Or perhaps simply German. “Look at the scandal there
notorious GQ cover story in 2014. The pair seem to be a
was with Janet Jackson over here,” she says referring to
perfect match, with the effervescent Rihanna taking little
the Super Bowl nipple slip of 2004. “It was a boob! It’s
persuading from von Unwerth to showcase her coquett-
something you should be proud of and not hide. Especial-
ish and playful side.
ly if it’s nice. Ha ha ha ha! In Germany it is not like this.
In a career that has spanned well over 25 years, Ellen
Even if you go to a park in Berlin in the summer, every-
von Unwerth has dramatically helped shape the way
body is naked and playing frisbee. You would get arrested
women are portrayed on camera. Working in a profession
if you did that in LA.”
dominated by men, her unique approach to displaying sexuality has broken with convention and paved the way for many female photographers. As well as striking a different path to her male counterparts, her photography manages to capture the very essence of desire, eroticism and pleasure – three cornerstones of modern fashion advertising. Her inimitable use of sensual imagery has not only led to commercial and artistic success, but, in a broader sense, it has altered the way female sexuality is represented within fashion. “It’s not special any more to be a photographer,” she says. “Even when I take a picture, everybody stands next to me and takes the same picture. Five minutes later it’s on everyone else’s Instagram and I’m old news – so I’m forced to take pictures on my iPhone too.” She tells me she can usually tell the difference between a photograph a man has taken and one a woman has taken. “But I find it crazy how women photograph themselves
Katy Perry Portrait
47
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LUST
Claudia Schiffer 2102 Ellen von Unwerth. September 2012
“I think tha the obsessi with techni is a male th I would rat search for model or loc
hat sion nique thing. ather r a new location.”
Born in 1954 in Frankfurt, Germany, von Unwerth experienced a tough and testing childhood. At the age of two she tragically lost both her parents and spent many years moving around orphanages and foster homes in the city. Despite this turbulent upbringing, von Unwerth recalls that she had a positive outlook on life as far back as she can remember. In her book, Fräulein, she recalls that she had a sunny disposition. “I didn’t suffer too much,” she said. “In fact, I remember my childhood as being fairly happy”. This ability to remain upbeat has served her well throughout her career and has become entrenched, stylistically, in her photography. Von Unwerth encourages her models to showcase their personalities: they come across as happy and engaging; the antithesis of the unobtainable trophies portrayed by many of her contemporaries. Her desire to showcase confidence and character can be traced back to her time as a professional model, a career she fell into by pure chance. After being spotted by a talent scout at university in Munich, she was asked to do a trial shoot for Bravo, a popular German teen magazine. It went well and she soon moved to Paris, working with influential photographers such as Guy Bourdin and Oliviero Toscani. She felt that a model was restricted to listening orders regarding her poses. Hence she held a camera and decided to work behind it since she had gained experience in the field. With this step, she could let the models show some creativity in poses. At this time she was being given essential insight about photography by a photographer whom she was living with. Only after a few years, she came in to the light by doing a shoot for GUESS, Claudia Schiffer as the model. Works by Von Unwerth have been featured in magazines, such as Vanity Fair, The Face, i-D, Interview, Twill, Arena and Vogue. In 1991, she received first prize at the International Festival of Fashion Photography. By 1998, the American Photo Magazine listed her among the Most Important People in Photography. Since this time, she has been on the radar as being among the best female photographers with a natural talent to capture the sensuality of women. She was lucky that she experienced modeling herself and this part of her career aids her in understanding models’ minds, unlike photographers who lack this know-how and are on the other end of the bridge. Ellen Von Unwerth did not like the static positions of models, having to stand in a single pose for a really long time, so she reversed this culture at least in her photography. She promoted playful, kinetic and progressing gestures and poses in a model. Since the beginning of her career as an adult, she has been photographing or has been the subject of photography herself. In the industry, she is noted for her fashion photography because she pushes the limits female sexuality in photography in general and in fashion. She has created outstanding editorial pages for famous magazines. Additionally, she has made commercials and music videos. Hence she is not just a photographer but a
37
LUST
director who specializes in femininity with eroticism. Like so many of her passions, von Unwerth’s introduction to photography occurred by happy accident. Her fixation began after a boyfriend at the time gave her a camera as a gift. After a brief lesson on the camera’s technical operation, she was soon photographing her friends and the places she travelled to through work. What started out as a hobby turned into obsession after Jill, a cult French fashion magazine from the early ’80s, published some of her travel shots of a trip to Kenya. She was soon contributing images to them on a regular basis. Her early photography featured plenty of movement and energy and her mix of spontaneity and classical glamour soon attracted many admirers, including British designer Katharine Hamnett. Seeing her early images in Jill, Hamnett offered her work shooting an advertising campaign in 1989 and the resulting black and white images continued her street and reportage style. Later that year, she received her big break when she shot an advertising campaign for Guess with a German model, Claudia Schiffer. The sensual, sophisticated imagery was a departure for von Unwerth but the shoot would transform the fortunes of both women. It was widely seen as the moment the world was made aware of Schiffer, who would go on to become one of the most successful supermodels of all time. This shoot announced von Unwerth to the fashion world and subsequently landed her a job shooting for Vogue Italia in 1990. As her reputation grew, her style developed. She blended the glamorous eroticism of Helmut Newton with a uniquely feminine view of
Ellen Von Unwerth For Chantal Thomass Lingerie Spring/Summer 2014
sexuality. It exuded the necessary sophistication and opulence required for the glossy magazines, but underneath the surface was a suggestive irreverence that fitted the feel of the early ’90s perfectly. Over the next 20 years, she continued to shoot powerful, intimate images of women for clients such as Playboy, Vanity Fair, GQ, Vogue and Agent Provocateur. Always choosing to focus on a model’s personality and sense of fun, her stylized photography managed to balance art and fantasy with sadomasochistic themes to create visceral, eye-catching imagery. There are many reoccurring themes in von Unwerth’s work and a lot of her imagery tends to focus of the dual ideas of freedom and transformation. Although these powerful motifs are prominent throughout her career, they can be traced back to her formative teenage years. Soon after leaving foster care, von Unwerth relocated to Oberstdorf, a small town high up in the mountains to the south east of Munich. She and several friends started a hippie commune in an old farmhouse; she said of the time that “it was here that I started to enjoy my life.” With artists, performers and musicians from all over Europe passing through, a creative community began to emerge and this new group of people piqued her interest in unusual and non-conformist behavior. Although she didn’t realize it yet, the experiences she had during this time would become a central theme in her later photography. This love of the alternative lifestyle was further cemented when she began work at a circus in Munich in the early ’80s. Although it was only a brief period of employment, the bright lights, vibrant visuals and elaborate costumes
39
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LUST
stylistically significant in her later work. Many of her most
way female sexuality is represented within fashion.
enduring shoots, including a Harper’s Bazaar editorial in
“It’s not special any more to be a photographer,” she
2015, feature the big top as a backdrop. For von U n w -
says. “Even when I take a picture, everybody stands next
e rt h, t he c irc u s is a succinct visual m etaphor, a
to me and takes the same picture. Five minutes later it’s
s ub t le w a y t o t ell sto ries o f escapism , f reed om
on everyone else’s Instagram and I’m old news – so I’m
a nd t ra nsforma tio n.
forced to take pictures on my iPhone too.”
Although widely known for her work in fashion, von Unw-
She tells me she can usually tell the difference between
erth has also managed to establish herself as an interna-
a photograph a man has taken and one a woman has
tionally renowned photographer across a range of subject
taken. “But I find it crazy how women photograph them-
matters. Early in her career, she merged her love of pho-
selves all the time. When I was a girl and looked in the
tography and music when she shot promotional imagery
mirror, my stepmother would come in and give me a slap.
for British band Duran Duran’s 1990 album, Liberty. She
There was this idea that if you did that, the devil would
would continue to work with the group over the next decade,
get in you and steal your personality. Now everyone does
shooting album covers and tour posters and even directing
this. I ask models sometimes, ‘Do you have to take so
the video to their single, “Electric Barbarella”.
many selfies?’ And they say: ‘Only when I take selfies do
As she established a reputation for herself, many more
I get likes.’ It’s sad! Narcissism is so celebrated in our
musicians sought her artistic guidance. Albums for Janet
society, sometimes people lose interest in other people.”
Jackson, Bananarama, All Saints, Britney Spears and
It is clear that everyone had a whole lot of giggles in
Christina Aguilera soon followed. She has also worked
Bavaria. Von Unwerth motions towards an image of three
extensively with Rihanna, most notably shooting the cov-
women topless on a sled: “This model is Miss Russia and
ers of both Rated R and Talk That Talk.
she brought a lot of vodka to the shoot. So they were
The relationship has since developed, with the two
drinking behind my back in the snow.” Von Unwerth is
working together on several photoshoots, including a
not much given to analysing. When I allude to the “male
notorious GQ cover story in 2014. The pair seem to be a
gaze” she has no idea what I’m talking about. When I find
perfect match, with the effervescent Rihanna taking little
myself grasping for the word “pornography” she shoots
persuading from von Unwerth to showcase her coquett-
back: “Have you ever seen a porno?” Well, one of your
ish and playful side.
pictures does literally depict two people having sex in a
In a career that has spanned well over 25 years, Ellen
hayloft. “It’s more inspired by a B-movie sense of camp. I
von Unwerth has dramatically helped shape the way
wouldn’t say porno.” (After our interview, one of her assistants
women are portrayed on camera. Working in a profession
calls me to make sure that I don’t think it’s pornographic.)
dominated by men, her unique approach to displaying
Of course, the word I should have reached for was erotic.
sexuality has broken with convention and paved the way
Or perhaps simply German. “Look at the scandal there
for many female photographers.
was with Janet Jackson over here,” she says referring to
As well as striking a different path to her male counter-
the Super Bowl nipple slip of 2004. “It was a boob! It’s
parts, her photography manages to capture the very
something you should be proud of and not hide. Espe-
essence of desire, eroticism and pleasure – three corner-
cially if it’s nice. Ha ha ha ha! In Germany it is not like this.
stones of modern fashion advertising. Her inimitable use
Even if you go to a park in Berlin in the summer, every-
of sensual imagery has not only led to commercial and
body is naked and playing frisbee. You would get arrested
artistic success, but, in a broader sense, it has altered the
if you did that in LA.”
“But you see so many images that are dark and depressing at the moment. All these sad women being sad! So I figured, let’s show girls having fun and enjoying life.” Katy Perry Portrait
47
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Fall 2017
Vol. 35
T
LUST
Octubre 2017 Volume 35
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LUST Fall 2017
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Volume 35
LUST Octubre 2017 Volume 35
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Octubre 2017 Volume 35
Octubre 2017 Volume 35
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Octubre 2017 Volume 35
Fashion Photographer Ellen von Unwerth
Octubre 2017
Volume 35
Sontag, On Photography
Fashion Photographer Ellen von Unwerth
Richard Avedon
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LUST Volume 35
Fall 2017
Sontag, On Photography
Richard Avedon
Fashion Photographer Ellen von Unwerth
Volume 35 Fall 2017
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LUST Volume 35 Fall 2017
Richard Avedon
Sontag, On Photography
Fashion Photographer Ellen von Unwerth
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LUST Octubre 2017
LUST
Volume 35
Sontag, On Photography
Fashion Photographer Ellen von Unwerth
Richard Avedon
Octubre 2017
Volume 35
Sontag, On Photography Fashion Photographer Ellen von Unwerth Richard Avedon
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Extraordinary History Photography by Richard Avedon
Written by Rebecca Rapp
“But I always knew I was going to be part of a great picture.”
Richard Avedon for Harper’s Bazaar June 1961
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American photographer Richard Avedon was best known for his work in the fashion world and for his minimalist portraits. He worked first as a photographer for the Merchant Marines, taking identification photos. He then moved to fashion, shooting for Harper’s Bazaar and Vogue, demanding that his models convey emotion and movement, a departure from the norm of motionless fashion photography.Richard Avedon was born on May 15, 1923 in New York City. His mother, Anna Avedon, came from a family of dress manufacturers, and his father, Jacob Israel Avedon, owned a clothing store called Avedon’s Fifth Avenue. Inspired by his parents’ clothing businesses, as a boy Avedon took a great interest in fashion, especially enjoying photographing the clothes in his father’s store. At the age of 12, he joined the YMHA (Young Men’s Hebrew Association) Camera Club. Avedon later described one childhood moment in particular as helping to kindle his interest in fashion photography: “One evening my father and I were walking down Fifth Avenue looking at the store windows,” he remembered. “In front of the Plaza Hotel, I saw a bald man with a camera posing a very beautiful woman against a tree. He lifted
Jean Shrimpton, evening dress by Cardin, Paris, January 1970
his head, adjusted her dress a little bit and took some photographs. Later, I saw the picture in Harper’s Bazaar. I didn’t understand why he’d taken her against that tree until I got to Paris a few years later: the tree in front of the Plaza had that same peeling bark you see all over the Champs-Elysees.” Avedon attended DeWitt Clinton High School in New York City, where one of his classmates and closest friends was the great writer James Baldwin. In addition to his continued interest in fashion and photography, in high school Avedon also developed an affinity for poetry. He and Baldwin served as co-editors of the school’s prestigious literary magazine, The Magpie, and during his senior year, in 1941, Avedon was named “Poet Laureate of New York City High Schools.” After high school, Avedon enrolled at Columbia University to study philosophy and poetry. However, he dropped out after only one year to serve in the United States Merchant Marine during World War II. As a Photographer’s Mate Second Class, his main duty was taking identification portraits of sailors. Avedon served in the Merchant Marine for two years, from 1942 to 1944. Upon leaving the Merchant Marine in 1944, Avedon attended the New School for Social Research in New York City to study photography under Alexey Brodovitch, the acclaimed art director of Harper’s Bazaar. Avedon and Brodovitch formed a close bond, and within one year Avedon was hired as a staff photographer for the magazine. After several years photographing daily life in New York City, Avedon was assigned to cover the spring and fall fashion collections in Paris. While legendary editor Carmel Snow covered the runway shows, Avedon’s task was to stage photographs of models wearing the new fashions
Audery Hepburn January 1967
out in the city itself. Throughout the late 1940s and early 1950s he created elegant black-and-white photographs showcasing the latest fashions in real-life settings such as Paris’s picturesque cafes, cabarets and streetcars. Already established as one of the most talented young fashion photographers in the business, in 1955 Avedon made fashion and photography history when he staged a photo shoot at a circus. The iconic photograph of that shoot, “Dovima with Elephants,” features the most famous model of the time in a black Dior evening gown with a long white silk sash. She is posed between two elephants,
Twiggy Lawson 1968
her back serenely arched as she holds on to the trunk of one elephant while reaching out fondly toward the other. The image remains one of the most strikingly original and iconic fashion photographs of all time. “He asked me to do extraordinary things,” Dovima said of Avedon. “But I always knew I was going to be part of a great picture.” Avedon served as a staff photographer for Harper’s Bazaar for 20 years, from 1945 to 1965. In addition to his fashion photography, he was also well known for his portraiture. His black-and-white portraits were remarkable for capturing the essential humanity and vulnerability lurking in such larger-than-life figures as President Dwight D. Eisenhower, Marilyn Monroe, Bob Dylan and The Beatles. During the 1960s, Avedon also expanded into more explicitly political photography. He did portraits of civil rights leaders such as Dr. Martin Luther King Jr., Malcolm X and Julian Bond, as well as segregationists such as Alabama Governor George Wallace, and ordinary people involved in demonstrations. In 1969, he shot a series of Vietnam War portraits that included the Chicago Seven, American soldiers and Vietnamese napalm victims. Avedon left Harper’s Bazaar in 1965, and from 1966 to 1990 he worked as a photographer for Vogue, its chief rival among American fashion magazines. He continued to push the boundaries of fashion photography with surreal, provocative and often controversial pictures in which nudity, violence and death featured prominently. He also continued to take illuminating portraits of leading cultural and political figures, ranging from Stephen Sondheim
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Richard Avedon for Harper’s Bazaar June 1961
Extraordinary History Photography by Richard Avedon
Written by Rebecca Rapp
American photographer Richard Avedon was best known for his work in the fashion world and for his minimalist portraits. He worked first as a photographer for the Merchant Marines, taking identification photos. He then moved to fashion, shooting for Harper’s Bazaar and Vogue, demanding that his models convey emotion and movement, a departure from the norm of motionless fashion photography.Richard Avedon was born on May 15, 1923 in New York City. His mother, Anna Avedon, came from a family of dress manufacturers, and his father, Jacob Israel Avedon, owned a clothing store called Avedon’s Fifth Avenue. Inspired by his parents’ clothing businesses, as a boy Avedon took a great interest in fashion, especially enjoying photographing the clothes in his father’s store. At the age of 12, he joined the YMHA (Young Men’s Hebrew Association) Camera Club. Avedon later described one childhood moment in particular as helping to kindle his interest in fashion photography: “One evening my father and I were walking down Fifth Avenue looking at the store windows,” he remembered. “In front of the Plaza Hotel, I saw a bald man with a camera posing a very beautiful woman against a tree. He lifted his head, adjusted her dress a little bit and took some photographs. Later, I saw the picture in Harper’s Bazaar. I didn’t understand why he’d taken her against that tree until I got to Paris a few years later: the tree in front of the Plaza had that same peeling bark you see all over the Champs-Elysees.”
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Avedon attended DeWitt Clinton High School in New York City, where one of his classmates and closest friends was the great writer James Baldwin. In addition to his continued interest in fashion and photography, in high school Avedon also developed an affinity for poetry. He and Baldwin served as co-editors of the school’s prestigious literary magazine, The Magpie, and during his senior year, in 1941, Avedon was named “Poet Laureate of New York City High Schools.” After high school, Avedon enrolled at Columbia University to study philosophy and poetry. However, he dropped out after only one year to serve in the United States Merchant Marine during World War II. As a Photographer’s Mate Second Class, his main duty was taking identification portraits of sailors. Avedon served in the Merchant Marine for two years, from 1942 to 1944. Upon leaving the Merchant Marine in 1944, Avedon attended the New School for Social Research in New York City to study photography under Alexey Brodovitch, the acclaimed art director of Harper’s Bazaar. Avedon and Brodovitch formed a close bond, and within one year Avedon was hired as a staff photographer for the magazine. After several years photographing daily life in New York City, Avedon was assigned to cover the spring and fall fashion collections in Paris. While legendary editor Carmel Snow covered the runway shows, Avedon’s task was to stage photographs of models wearing the new fashions out in the city itself. Throughout the late 1940s and early 1950s he created elegant black-and-white photographs showcasing the latest fashions in real-life settings such as Paris’s picturesque cafes, cabarets and streetcars. Already established as one of the most talented young fashion photographers in the business, in 1955 Avedon made fashion and photography history when he staged a photo shoot at a circus. The iconic photograph of that shoot, “Dovima with Elephants,” features the most famous model of the time in a black Dior evening gown with a long white silk sash. She is posed between two elephants, her back serenely arched as she holds on to the trunk of one elephant while reaching out fondly toward the other. The image remains one of the most strikingly original and iconic fashion photographs of all time. “He asked me to do extraordinary things,” Dovima said of Avedon. “But I always knew I was going to be part of a great picture.” Avedon served as a staff photographer for Harper’s Bazaar for 20 years, from 1945 to 1965. In addition to his fashion photography, he was also well known for his portraiture. His black-and-white portraits were remarkable for capturing the essential humanity and vulnerability lurking in such larger-than-life figures as President Dwight D. Eisenhower, Marilyn Monroe, Bob Dylan and The Beatles. During the 1960s, Avedon also expanded into more explicitly political photography. He did portraits of civil rights
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Written by Rebecca Rapp
Extraordinary History Photography by Richard Avedon
Richard Avedon for Harper’s Bazaar June 1961
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Dovima with Elephants August 1955
Audery Hepburn January 1967
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Audery Hepburn January 1967
American photographer Richard Avedon was best known for his work in the fashion world and for his minimalist portraits. He worked first as a photographer for the Merchant Marines, taking identification photos. He then moved to fashion, shooting for Harper’s Bazaar and Vogue, demanding that his models convey emotion and movement, a departure from the norm of motionless fashion photography.Richard Avedon was born on May 15, 1923 in New York City. His mother, Anna Avedon, came from a family of dress manufacturers, and his father, Jacob Israel Avedon, owned a clothing store called Avedon’s Fifth Avenue. Inspired by his parents’ clothing businesses, as a boy Avedon took a great interest in fashion, especially enjoying photographing the clothes in his father’s store. At the age of 12, he joined the YMHA (Young Men’s Hebrew Association) Camera Club. Avedon later described one childhood moment in particular as helping to kindle his interest in fashion photography: “One evening my father and I were walking down Fifth Avenue looking at the store windows,” he remembered. “In front of the Plaza Hotel, I saw a bald man with a camera posing a very beautiful woman against a tree. He lifted his head, adjusted her dress a little bit and took some photographs. Later, I saw the picture in Harper’s Bazaar. I didn’t understand why he’d taken her against that tree until I got to Paris a few years later: the tree in front of the Plaza had that same peeling bark you see all over the Champs-Elysees.” Avedon attended DeWitt Clinton High School in New York City, where one of his classmates and closest friends was the great writer James Baldwin. In addition to his continued interest in fashion and photography, in high school Avedon also developed an affinity for poetry. He and Baldwin served as co-editors of the school’s prestigious literary magazine, The Magpie, and during his senior year, in 1941, Avedon was named “Poet Laureate of New York City High Schools.” After high school, Avedon enrolled at Columbia University to study philosophy and poetry. However, he dropped out after only one year to serve in the United States Merchant Marine during World War II. As a Photographer’s Mate Second Class, his main duty was taking identification portraits of sailors. Avedon served in the Merchant Marine for two years, from 1942 to 1944.
Jean Shrimpton, evening dress by Cardin, Paris, January 1970
Upon leaving the Merchant Marine in 1944, Avedon attended the New School for Social Research in New York City to study photography under Alexey Brodovitch, the acclaimed art director of Harper’s Bazaar. Avedon and Brodovitch formed a close bond, and within one year Avedon was hired as a staff photographer for the magazine. After several years photographing daily life in New York City, Avedon was assigned to cover the spring and fall fashion collections in Paris. While legendary editor Carmel Snow covered the runway shows, Avedon’s task was to stage photographs of models wearing the new fashions out in the city itself. Throughout the late 1940s and early 1950s he created elegant black-and-white photographs
“But I always knew I was going to be part of a great picture.”
Twiggy Lawson 1968
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“But I always knew I was going to be part of a great picture.”
Dovima with Elephants August 1955
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Alluring
Photography by Ellen von Unwerth
Freedom Written by Rebecca Rapp
Ellen von Unwerth is one of the most influential fashion photographers alive today. Her unmistakable aesthetic blends beautiful women, eroticism and a sense of playfulness with consummate skill. Her ability to get more from her subjects helps her to create alternate realities where things are just that little bit more free and fun. Her hedonistic teenage years spent between circus tents and hippie communes remain a big aesthetic influence and she draws upon these experiences to weave narrative into her photography. Her ability to perfectly balance escapism with a sense of timeless glamour has led her to work for some of the world’s most renowned publications and luxurious brands.
Ellen von Unwerth for Royalty Fame
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Claudia Schiffer 2102 Ellen von Unwerth. September 2012
“I think tha the obsessi with techni is a male th I would rat search for model or loc
hat sion nique thing. ather r a new location.”
Born in 1954 in Frankfurt, Germany, von Unwerth experienced a tough and testing childhood. At the age of two she tragically lost both her parents and spent many years moving around orphanages and foster homes in the city. Despite this turbulent upbringing, von Unwerth recalls that she had a positive outlook on life as far back as she can remember. In her book, Fräulein, she recalls that she had a sunny disposition. “I didn’t suffer too much,” she said. “In fact, I remember my childhood as being fairly happy”. This ability to remain upbeat has served her well throughout her career and has become entrenched, stylistically, in her photography. Von Unwerth encourages her models to showcase their personalities: they come across as happy and engaging; the antithesis of the unobtainable trophies portrayed by many of her contemporaries. Her desire to showcase confidence and character can be traced back to her time as a professional model, a career she fell into by pure chance. After being spotted by a talent scout at university in Munich, she was asked to do a trial shoot for Bravo, a popular German teen magazine. It went well and she soon moved to Paris, working with influential photographers such as Guy Bourdin and Oliviero Toscani. She felt that a model was restricted to listening orders regarding her poses. Hence she held a camera and decided to work behind it since she had gained experience in the field. With this step, she could let the models show some creativity in poses. At this time she was being given essential insight about photography by a photographer whom she was living with. Only after a few years, she came in to the light by doing a shoot for GUESS, Claudia Schiffer as the model. Works by Von Unwerth have been featured in magazines, such as Vanity Fair, The Face, i-D, Interview, Twill, Arena and Vogue. In 1991, she received first prize at the International Festival of Fashion Photography. By 1998, the American Photo Magazine listed her among the Most Important People in Photography. Since this time, she has been on the radar as being among the best female photographers with a natural talent to capture the sensuality of women. She was lucky that she experienced modeling herself and this part of her career aids her in understanding models’ minds, unlike photographers who lack this know-how and are on the other end of the bridge. Ellen Von Unwerth did not like the static positions of models, having to stand in a single pose for a really long time, so she reversed this culture at least in her photography. She promoted playful, kinetic and progressing gestures and poses in a model.
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been photographing or has been the subject of photography herself. In the industry, she is noted for her fashion photography because she pushes the limits female sexuality in photography in general and in fashion. She has created outstanding editorial pages for famous magazines. Additionally, she has made commercials and music videos. Hence she is not just a photographer but a director who specializes in femininity with eroticism. Like so many of her passions, von Unwerth’s introduction to photography occurred by happy accident. Her fixation began after a boyfriend at the time gave her a camera as a gift. After a brief lesson on the camera’s technical operation, she was soon photographing her friends and the places she travelled to through work. What started out as a hobby turned into obsession after Jill, a cult French fashion magazine from the early ’80s, published some of her travel shots of a trip to Kenya. She was soon contributing images to them on a regular basis. Her early photography featured plenty of movement and energy and her mix of spontaneity and classical glamour soon attracted many admirers, including British designer Katharine Hamnett. Seeing her early images in Jill, Hamnett offered her work shooting an advertising campaign in 1989 and the resulting black and white images continued her street and reportage style. Later that year, she received her big break when she shot an advertising campaign for Guess with a German model, Claudia Schiffer. The sensual, sophisticated imagery was a departure for von Unwerth but the shoot would transform the fortunes of both women. It was widely seen as the moment the world was made aware of Schiffer, who would go on to become one of the most successful
supermodels of all time. This shoot announced von Unwerth to the fashion world and subsequently landed her a job shooting for Vogue Italia in 1990. As her reputation grew, her style developed. She blended the glamorous eroticism of Helmut Newton with a uniquely feminine view of sexuality. It exuded the necessary sophistication and opulence required for the glossy magazines, but underneath the surface was a suggestive irreverence that fitted the feel of the early ’90s perfectly. Over the next 20 years, she continued to shoot powerful, intimate images of women for clients such as Playboy, Vanity Fair, GQ, Vogue and Agent Provocateur. Always choosing to focus on a model’s personality and sense of fun, her stylized photography managed to balance art and fantasy with sadomasochistic themes to create visceral, eye-catching imagery. There are many reoccurring themes in von Unwerth’s work and a lot of her imagery tends to focus of the dual ideas of freedom and transformation. Although these powerful motifs are prominent throughout her career, they can be traced back to her formative teenage years. Soon after leaving foster care, von Unwerth relocated to Oberstdorf, a small town high up in the mountains to the south east of Munich. She and several friends started a hippie commune in an old farmhouse; she said of the time that “it was here that I started to enjoy my life.” With artists, performers and musicians from all over Europe passing through, a creative community began to emerge and this new group of people piqued her interest in unusual and non-conformist behavior. Although she didn’t realize it yet, the experiences she had during this time would
Ellen Von Unwerth For Chantal Thomass Lingerie Spring/Summer 2014
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didn’t realize it yet, the experiences she had during this
dominated by men, her unique approach to displaying
wouldn’t say porno.” (After our interview, one of her assistants
time would become a central theme in her later photog-
sexuality has broken with convention and paved the way
calls me to make sure that I don’t think it’s pornographic.)
raphy.
for many female photographers.
Of course, the word I should have reached for was erotic.
This love of the alternative lifestyle was further cemented
As well as striking a different path to her male counter-
Or perhaps simply German. “Look at the scandal there
when she began work at a circus in Munich in the early
parts, her photography manages to capture the very
was with Janet Jackson over here,” she says referring to
’80s. Although it was only a brief period of employment,
essence of desire, eroticism and pleasure – three corner-
the Super Bowl nipple slip of 2004. “It was a boob! It’s
the bright lights, vibrant visuals and elaborate costumes
stones of modern fashion advertising. Her inimitable use
something you should be proud of and not hide. Espe-
stylistically significant in her later work. Many of her most
of sensual imagery has not only led to commercial and
cially if it’s nice. Ha ha ha ha! In Germany it is not like this.
enduring shoots, including a Harper’s Bazaar editorial in
artistic success, but, in a broader sense, it has altered the
Even if you go to a park in Berlin in the summer, every-
2015, feature the big top as a backdrop. For von U n w -
way female sexuality is represented within fashion.
body is naked and playing frisbee. You would get arrested
e rt h, t he c irc u s is a succinct visual m etaphor, a
“It’s not special any more to be a photographer,” she
if you did that in LA.”
s ub t le w a y t o t ell sto ries o f escapism , f reed om
says. “Even when I take a picture, everybody stands next
a nd t ra nsforma tio n.
to me and takes the same picture. Five minutes later it’s
Although widely known for her work in fashion, von Unw-
on everyone else’s Instagram and I’m old news – so I’m
erth has also managed to establish herself as an interna-
forced to take pictures on my iPhone too.”
tionally renowned photographer across a range of subject
She tells me she can usually tell the difference between
matters. Early in her career, she merged her love of pho-
a photograph a man has taken and one a woman has
tography and music when she shot promotional imagery
taken. “But I find it crazy how women photograph them-
for British band Duran Duran’s 1990 album, Liberty. She
selves all the time. When I was a girl and looked in the
would continue to work with the group over the next decade,
mirror, my stepmother would come in and give me a slap.
shooting album covers and tour posters and even directing
There was this idea that if you did that, the devil would
the video to their single, “Electric Barbarella”.
get in you and steal your personality. Now everyone does
As she established a reputation for herself, many more
this. I ask models sometimes, ‘Do you have to take so
musicians sought her artistic guidance. Albums for Janet
many selfies?’ And they say: ‘Only when I take selfies do
Jackson, Bananarama, All Saints, Britney Spears and
I get likes.’ It’s sad! Narcissism is so celebrated in our
Christina Aguilera soon followed. She has also worked
society, sometimes people lose interest in other people.”
extensively with Rihanna, most notably shooting the cov-
It is clear that everyone had a whole lot of giggles in
ers of both Rated R and Talk That Talk.
Bavaria. Von Unwerth motions towards an image of three
The relationship has since developed, with the two
women topless on a sled: “This model is Miss Russia and
working together on several photoshoots, including a
she brought a lot of vodka to the shoot. So they were
notorious GQ cover story in 2014. The pair seem to be a
drinking behind my back in the snow.” Von Unwerth is
perfect match, with the effervescent Rihanna taking little
not much given to analysing. When I allude to the “male
persuading from von Unwerth to showcase her coquett-
gaze” she has no idea what I’m talking about. When I find
ish and playful side.
myself grasping for the word “pornography” she shoots
In a career that has spanned well over 25 years, Ellen
back: “Have you ever seen a porno?” Well, one of your
von Unwerth has dramatically helped shape the way
pictures does literally depict two people having sex in a
women are portrayed on camera. Working in a profession
hayloft. “It’s more inspired by a B-movie sense of camp. I
“But you see so many images that are dark and depressing at the moment. All these sad women being sad! So I figured, let’s show girls having fun and enjoying life.” Katy Perry Portrait
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Photography by Richard Avedon
Extraordinary History Written by Rebecca Rapp
Richard Avedon for Harper’s Bazaar June 1961
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Untitled
Untitled
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American photographer Richard Avedon was best known for his work in the fashion world and for his minimalist portraits. He worked first as a photographer for the Merchant Marines, taking identification photos. He then moved to fashion, shooting for Harper’s Bazaar and Vogue, demanding that his models convey emotion and movement, a departure from the norm of motionless fashion photography.Richard Avedon was born on May 15, 1923 in New York City. Avedon later described one childhood moment in particular as helping to kindle Audery Hepburn January 1967
his interest in fashion photography: “One evening my father and I were walking down Fifth Avenue looking at the store windows,” he remembered. “In front of the Plaza Hotel, I saw a bald man with a camera posing a very beautiful woman against a tree. He lifted his head, adjusted her dress a little bit and took some photographs. Later, I saw the picture in Harper’s Bazaar. I didn’t understand why he’d taken her against that tree until I got to Paris a few years later: the tree in front of the Plaza had that same peeling bark you see all over the Champs-Elysees.” Already established as one of the most talented young fashion photographers in the business, in 1955 Avedon made fashion and photography history when he staged a photo shoot at a circus. The iconic photograph of that shoot, “Dovima with Elephants,” features the most famous model of the time in a black Dior evening gown with a long white silk sash. She is posed between two elephants, her back serenely arched as she holds on to the trunk of one elephant while reaching out fondly toward the other. The image remains one of the most strikingly original and iconic fashion photographs of all time. “He asked me to do extraordinary things,” Dovima said of Avedon. “But I always knew I was going to be part of a great picture.” Avedon served as a staff photographer for Harper’s Bazaar for 20 years, from 1945 to 1965. His black-and-white portraits were remarkable for capturing the essential humanity and vulnerability lurking in such larger-than-life figures as President Dwight D. Eisenhower, Marilyn Monroe, Bob Dylan and The Beatles. During the 1960s, Avedon also expanded into more explicitly political photography. Avedon left Harper’s Bazaar in 1965, and from 1966 to 1990 he worked as a photographer for Vogue. He continued to push the boundaries of fashion photography with surreal, provocative and often controversial pictures in which nudity, violence and death featured prominently. He also continued to take illuminating portraits of leading cultural and political figures. In addition to his work for Vogue, Avedon was also a driving force behind photography’s emergence as a legitimate art form during the 1960s, ‘70s and ‘80s. In 1959 he published a book of photographs, Observations, and in 1964 he published Nothing Personal, another collection of photographs. “I’ve photographed just about everyone in the world,” he said at the time. “But what I hope to do is photograph people of accomplishment, not celebrity, and help define the difference once again.” His last project for The New Yorker, which remained unfinished, was a portfolio entitled “Democracy” that included portraits of political leaders such as Karl Rove and John Kerry as well as ordinary citizens engaged in political and social activism.
Jean Shrimpton, evening dress by Cardin, Paris, January 1970
Untitled
Twiggy Lawson 1968
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Dovima with Elephants August 1955
“But I always knew I was going to be part of a great picture.”
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Richard Avedon for Harper’s Bazaar June 1961
Extraordinary History Photography by Richard Avedon
Written by Rebecca Rapp
American photographer Richard Avedon was best known for his work in the fashion world and for his minimalist portraits. He worked first as a photographer for the Merchant Marines, taking identification photos. He then moved to fashion, shooting for Harper’s Bazaar and Vogue, demanding that his models convey emotion and movement, a departure from the norm of motionless fashion photography.Richard Avedon was born on May 15, 1923 in New York City. His mother, Anna Avedon, came from a family of dress manufacturers, and his father, Jacob Israel Avedon, owned a clothing store called Avedon’s Fifth Avenue. Inspired by his parents’ clothing businesses, as a boy Avedon took a great interest in fashion, especially enjoying photographing the clothes in his father’s store. At the age of 12, he joined the YMHA (Young Men’s Hebrew Association) Camera Club. Avedon later described one childhood moment in particular as helping to kindle his interest in fashion photography: “One evening my father and I were walking down Fifth Avenue looking at the store windows,” he remembered. “In front of the Plaza Hotel, I saw a bald man with a camera posing a very beautiful woman against a tree. He lifted his head, adjusted her dress a little bit and took some photographs. Later, I saw the picture in Harper’s Bazaar. I didn’t understand why he’d taken her against that tree until I got to Paris a few years later: the tree in front of the Plaza had that same peeling bark you see all over the Champs-Elysees.”
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Already established as one of the most talented young fashion photographers in the business, in 1955 Avedon made fashion and photography history when he staged a photo shoot at a circus. The iconic photograph of that shoot, “Dovima with Elephants,” features the most famous model of the time in a black Dior evening gown with a long white silk sash. She is posed between two elephants, her back serenely arched as she holds on to the trunk of one elephant while reaching out fondly toward the other. The image remains one of the most strikingly original and iconic fashion photographs of all time. “He asked me to do extraordinary things,” Dovima said of Avedon. “But I always knew I was going to be part of a great picture.” Avedon served as a staff photographer for Harper’s Bazaar for 20 years, from 1945 to 1965. His black-and-white portraits were remarkable for capturing the essential humanity and vulnerability lurking in such larger-than-life figures as President Dwight D. Eisenhower, Marilyn Monroe, Bob Dylan and The Beatles. During the 1960s, Avedon also expanded into more explicitly political photography. Avedon left Harper’s Bazaar in 1965, and from 1966 to 1990 he worked as a photographer for Vogue. He continued to push the boundaries of fashion photography with surreal, provocative and often controversial pictures in which nudity, violence and death featured prominently. He also continued to take illuminating portraits of leading cultural and political figures. In addition to his work for Vogue, Avedon was also a driving force behind photography’s emergence as a legitimate art form during the 1960s, ‘70s and ‘80s. In 1959 he published a book of photographs, Observations, and in 1964 he published Nothing Personal, another collection of photographs. “I’ve photographed just about everyone in the world,” he said at the time. “But what I hope to do is photograph people of accomplishment, not celebrity, and help define the difference once again.” His last project for The New Yorker, which remained unfinished, was a portfolio entitled “Democracy” that included portraits of political leaders such as Karl Rove and John Kerry as well as ordinary citizens engaged in political and social activism.
“But I always knew I was going to be part of a great pic ture.” 93
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Untitled
Dovima with Elephants August 1955
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Twiggy Lawson 1968
Untitled
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On Photography An Excerpt Plato’s Cave Written by Susan Sontage
Humankind lingers unregenerately in Plato’s cave, still reveling, its age-old habit, in mere images of the truth. But being educated by photographs is not like being educated by older, more artisanal images. For one thing, there are a great many more images around, claiming our attention. The inventory started in 1839 and since then just about everything has been photographed, or so it seems. This very insatiability of the photographing eye changes the terms of confinement in the cave, our world. In teaching us a new visual code, photographs alter and enlarge our notions of what is worth looking at and what we have a right to observe. They are a grammar and, even more importantly, an ethics of seeing. Finally, the most grandiose result of the photographic enterprise is to give us the sense that we can hold the whole world in our heads -- as an anthology of images. ※To collect photographs is to collect the world. Movies and television programs light up walls, flicker, and go out; but with still photographs the image is also an object, lightweight, cheap to produce, easy to carry about, accumulate, store. In Godard’s Les Carabiniers (1963), two sluggish lumpen-peasants are lured into joining the King’s Army by the promise that they will be able to loot, rape, kill, or do whatever else they please to the enemy, and get rich. But the suitcase of booty that Michel-Ange and Ulysse triumphantly bring home, years later, to their wives turns out to contain only picture postcards, hundreds of them, of Monuments, Department Stores, Mammals, Wonders of Nature, Methods of Transport, Works of Art, and other classified treasures from around the globe. Godard’s gag vividly parodies the equivocal magic of the photographic image., Photographs are perhaps the most mysterious of all the objects that make up, and thicken, the environment we recognize as modern. Photographs really are experience captured, and the camera is the ideal arm of consciousness in its acquisitive mood. To photograph is to appropriate the thing photographed. It means putting oneself into a certain relation to the world that feels like knowledge -- and, therefore, like power. A now notorious first fall into alienation, habituating people to abstract the world into printed words, is supposed to have engendered that surplus of Faustian energy and psychic damage needed to build modern, inorganic societies. But print seems a less treacherous form of leaching out the world, of turning it into a mental object, than photographic images, which now provide most of the knowledge people have about the look of the past and the reach of the present. What is written about a person or an event is frankly an interpretation, as are handmade visual statements, like paintings and drawings. Photographed images do not seem to be statements about the world so much as pieces of it, miniatures of reality that anyone can make or acquire. Photographs, which fiddle with the scale of the world, themselves get reduced, blown up, cropped, retouched, doctored, tricked out. They age, plagued by the usual ills of paper objects; they disappear; they become valuable, and get bought and sold; they are reproduced. Photographs, which package the world, seem to invite packaging. They are stuck in albums, framed and set on tables, tacked on walls, projected as slides. Newspapers and magazines feature them; cops alphabetize them; museums exhibit them; publishers compile them. For many decades the book has been the most influential way of arranging (and usually miniaturizing) photographs, thereby guaranteeing them longevity, if not immortality -- photographs are fragile objects, easily torn or mislaid -- and a wider public. The photograph in a book is, obviously, the image of an image. But since it is, to begin with, a printed, smooth object, a photograph loses much less of its essential quality when reproduced in a book than a painting does. Still, the book is not a wholly satisfactory scheme for putting groups of photographs into general circulation. The sequence in which the photographs are to be looked at is proposed by the order of pages, but nothing holds readers to the recommended order or indicates the amount of time to be spent on each photograph. Chris Marker’s film, Si j’avais quatre dromadaires (1966), a brilliantly orchestrated meditation on photographs of all sorts and themes, suggests a subtler and more rigorous way of packaging (and enlarging) still photographs. Both the order and the exact time for looking at each photograph are imposed; and there is a gain in visual legibility and emotional impact. But photographs transcribed in a film cease to be collectable objects, as they still are when served up in books.
“To collect photographs is to collect the world. Movies and television programs light up walls, flicker, and go out; but with still photographs the image is also an object, lightweight, cheap to produce, easy to carry about, accumulate, store.” Photographs furnish evidence. Something we hear about, but doubt, seems proven when we’re shown a photograph of it. In one version of its utility, the camera record incriminates. Starting with their use by the Paris police in the murderous roundup of Communards in June 1871, photographs became a useful tool of modern states in the surveillance and control of their increasingly mobile populations. In another version of its utility, the camera record justifies. A photograph passes for incontrovertible proof that a given thing happened. The picture may distort; but there is always a presumption that something exists, or did exist, which is like what’s in the picture. Whatever the limitations (through amateurism) or pretensions (through artistry) of the individual photographer, a photograph -any photograph -- seems to have a more innocent, and therefore more accurate, relation to visible reality than do other mimetic objects. Virtuosi of the noble image like Alfred Stieglitz and Paul Strand, composing mighty, unforgettable photographs decade after decade, still want, first of all, to show something “out there,” just like the Polaroid owner for whom photographs are a handy, fast form of note-taking, or the shutterbug with a Brownie who takes snapshots as souvenirs of daily life.
While a painting or a prose description can never be other than a narrowly selective interpretation, a photograph can be treated as a narrowly selective transparency. But despite the presumption of veracity that gives all photographs authority, interest, seductiveness, the work that photographers do is no generic exception to the usually shady commerce between art and truth. Even when photographers are most concerned with mirroring reality, they are still haunted by tacit imperatives of taste and conscience. The immensely gifted members of the Farm Security Administration photographic project of the late 1930s (among them Walker Evans, Dorothea Lange, Ben Shahn, Russell Lee) would take dozens of frontal pictures of one of their sharecropper subjects until satisfied that they had gotten just the right look on film -- the precise expression on the subject’s face that supported their own notions about poverty, light, dignity, texture, exploitation, and geometry. In deciding how a picture should look, in preferring one exposure to another, photographers are always imposing standards on their subjects. Although there is a sense in which the camera does indeed capture reality, not just interpret it, photographs are as much an interpretation of the world as paintings and drawings are. Those occasions when the taking of photographs is relatively undiscriminating, promiscuous, or self-effacing do not lessen the didacticism of the whole enterprise. This very passivity -- and ubiquity -- of the photographic record is photography’s “message,” its aggression. Images which idealize (like most fashion and animal photography) are no less aggressive than work which makes a virtue of plainness (like class pictures, still lifes of the bleaker sort, and mug shots). There is an aggression implicit in every use of the camera. This is as evident in the 1840s and 1850s, photography’s glorious first two decades, as in all the succeeding decades, during which technology made possible an ever increasing spread of that mentality which looks at the world as a set of potential photographs. Even for such early masters as David Octavius Hill and Julia Margaret Cameron who used the camera as a means of getting painterly images, the point of taking photographs was a vast departure from the aims of painters. From its start, photography implied the capture of the largest possible number of subjects. Painting never had so imperial a scope. The subsequent industrialization of camera technology only carried out a promise inherent in photography from its very beginning: to democratize all experiences by translating them into images. That age when taking photographs required a cumbersome and expensive contraption -- the toy of the clever, the wealthy, and the obsessed -- seems remote indeed from the era of sleek pocket cameras that invite anyone to take pictures. The first cameras, made in France and England in the early 1840s, had only inventors and buffs to operate them. Since there were then no professional photographers, there could not be amateurs either, and taking photographs had no clear social use; it was a gratuitous, that is, an artistic activity, though with few pretensions to being an art. It was only with its industrialization that photography came into its own as art. As industrialization provided social uses for the operations of the photographer, so the reaction against these uses reinforced the self-consciousness of photography-as-art.
101
LUST
On Photography An Excerpt Plato’s Cave Written by Susan Sontage
Humankind lingers unregenerately in Plato’s cave, still reveling, its age-old habit, in mere images of the truth. But being educated by photographs is not like being educated by older, more artisanal images. For one thing, there are a great many more images around, claiming our attention. The inventory started in 1839 and since then just about everything has been photographed, or so it seems. This very insatiability of the photographing eye changes the terms of confinement in the cave, our world. In teaching us a new visual code, photographs alter and enlarge our notions of what is worth looking at and what we have a right to observe. They are a grammar and, even more importantly, an ethics of seeing. Finally, the most grandiose result of the photographic enterprise is to give us the sense that we can hold the whole world in our heads -- as an anthology of images. ※※※※To collect photographs is to collect the world. Movies and television programs light up walls, flicker, and go out; but with still photographs the image is also an object, lightweight, cheap to produce, easy to carry about, accumulate, store. In Godard’s Les Carabiniers (1963), two sluggish lumpen-peasants are lured into joining the King’s Army by the promise that they will be able to loot, rape, kill, or do whatever else they please to the enemy, and get rich. But the suitcase of booty that Michel-Ange and Ulysse triumphantly bring home, years later, to their wives turns out to contain only picture postcards, hundreds of them, of Monuments, Department Stores, Mammals, Wonders of Nature, Methods of Transport, Works of Art, and other classified treasures from around the globe. Godard’s gag vividly parodies the equivocal magic of the photographic image., Photographs are perhaps the most mysterious of all the objects that make up, and thicken, the environment we recognize as modern. Photographs really are experience captured, and the camera is the ideal arm of consciousness in its acquisitive mood. ※※※※To photograph is to appropriate the thing photographed. It means putting oneself into a certain relation to the world that feels like knowledge -- and, therefore, like power. A now notorious first fall into alienation, habituating people to abstract the world into printed words, is supposed to have engendered that surplus of Faustian energy and psychic damage needed to build modern, inorganic societies. But print seems a less treacherous form of leaching out the world, of turning it into a mental object, than photographic images, which now provide most of the knowledge people have about the look of the past and the reach of the present. What is written about a person or an event is frankly an interpretation, as are handmade visual statements, like paintings and drawings. Photographed images do not seem to be statements about the world so much as pieces of it, miniatures of reality that anyone can make or acquire. ※※※※Photographs, which fiddle with the scale of the world, themselves get reduced, blown up, cropped, retouched, doctored, tricked out. They age, plagued by the usual ills of paper objects; they disappear; they become valuable, and get bought and sold; they are reproduced. Photographs, which package the world, seem to invite packaging. They are stuck in albums, framed and set on tables, tacked on walls, projected as slides. Newspapers and magazines feature them; cops alphabetize them; museums exhibit them; publishers compile them. ※※※※For many decades the book has been the most influential way of arranging (and usually miniaturizing) photographs, thereby guaranteeing them longevity, if not immortality -- photographs are fragile objects, easily torn or mislaid -- and a wider public. The photograph in a book is, obviously, the image of an image. But since it is, to begin with, a printed, smooth object, a photograph loses much less of its essential quality when reproduced in a book than a painting does. Still, the book is not a wholly satisfactory scheme for putting groups of photographs into general circulation. The sequence in which the photographs are to be looked at is proposed by the order of pages, but nothing holds readers to the recommended order or indicates the amount of time to be spent on each photograph. Chris Marker’s film, Si j’avais quatre dromadaires (1966), a brilliantly orchestrated meditation on photographs of all sorts and themes, suggests a subtler and more rigorous way of packaging (and enlarging) still photographs. Both the order and the exact time for looking at each photograph are imposed; and there is a gain in visual legibility and emotional impact. But photographs transcribed in a film cease to be collectable objects, as they still are when served up in books. ※※※※Photographs furnish evidence. Something we hear about, but doubt, seems proven when we’re shown a photograph of it. In one version of its utility, the camera record incriminates. Starting with their use by the Paris police in the murderous roundup of Communards in June 1871, photographs became a useful tool of modern states in the surveillance and control of their increasingly mobile populations. In another version of its utility, the camera record justifies. A photograph passes for incontrovertible proof that a given thing happened. The picture may distort; but there is always a presumption that something exists, or did exist, which is like what’s in the picture. Whatever the limitations (through amateurism) or pretensions (through artistry) of the individual photographer, a photograph -- any photograph -- seems to have a more innocent, and therefore more accurate, relation to visible reality than do other mimetic objects. Virtuosi
“To collect photographs is to collect the world.”
of the noble image like Alfred Stieglitz and Paul Strand, composing mighty, unforgettable photographs decade after decade, still want, first of all, to show something “out there,” just like the Polaroid owner for whom photographs are a handy, fast form of note-taking, or the shutterbug with a Brownie who takes snapshots as souvenirs of daily life. ※※※※While a painting or a prose description can never be other than a narrowly selective interpretation, a photograph can be treated as a narrowly selective transparency. But despite the presumption of veracity that gives all photographs authority, interest, seductiveness, the work that photographers do is no generic exception to the usually shady commerce between art and truth. Even when photographers are most concerned with mirroring reality, they are still haunted by tacit imperatives of taste and conscience. The immensely gifted members of the Farm Security Administration photographic project of the late 1930s (among them Walker Evans, Dorothea Lange, Ben Shahn, Russell Lee) would take dozens of frontal pictures of one of their sharecropper subjects until satisfied that they had gotten just the right look on film -- the precise expression on the subject’s face that supported their own notions about poverty, light, dignity, texture, exploitation, and geometry. In deciding how a picture should look, in preferring one exposure to another, photographers are always imposing standards on their subjects. Although there is a sense in which the camera does indeed capture reality, not just interpret it, photographs are as much an interpretation of the world as paintings and drawings are. Those occasions when the taking of photographs is relatively undiscriminating, promiscuous, or self-effacing do not lessen the didacticism of the whole enterprise. This very passivity -- and ubiquity -- of the photographic record is photography’s “message,” its aggression. ※※※※Images which idealize (like most fashion and animal photography) are no less aggressive than work which makes a virtue of plainness (like class pictures, still lifes of the bleaker sort, and mug shots). There is an aggression implicit in every use of the camera. This is as evident in the 1840s and 1850s, photography’s glorious first two decades, as in all the succeeding decades, during which technology made possible an ever increasing spread of that mentality which looks at the world as a set of potential photographs. Even for such early masters as David Octavius Hill and Julia Margaret Cameron who used the camera as a means of getting painterly images, the point of taking photographs was a vast departure from the aims of painters. From its start, photography implied the capture of the largest possible number of subjects. Painting never had so imperial a scope. The subsequent industrialization of camera technology only carried out a promise inherent in photography from its very beginning: to democratize all experiences by translating them into images. ※※※※That age when taking photographs required a cumbersome and expensive contraption -- the toy of the clever, the wealthy, and the obsessed -- seems remote indeed from the era of sleek pocket cameras that invite anyone to take pictures. The first cameras, made in France and England in the early 1840s, had only inventors and buffs to operate them. Since there were then no professional photographers, there could not be amateurs either, and taking photographs had no clear social use; it was a gratuitous, that is, an artistic activity, though with few pretensions to being an art. It was only with its industrialization that photography came into its own as art. As industrialization provided social uses for the operations of the photographer, so the reaction against these uses reinforced the self-consciousness of photography-as-art.
103
LUST
On Photography
An Excerpt Plato’s Cave Written by Susan Sontage
Humankind lingers unregenerately in Plato’s cave, still reveling, its age-old habit, in mere images of the truth. But being educated by photographs is not like being educated by older, more artisanal images. For one thing, there are a great many more images around, claiming our attention. The inventory started in 1839 and since then just about everything has been photographed, or so it seems. This very insatiability of the photographing eye changes the terms of confinement in the cave, our world. In teaching us a new visual code, photographs alter and enlarge our notions of what is worth looking at and what we have a right to observe. They are a grammar and, even more importantly, an ethics of seeing. Finally, the most grandiose result of the photographic enterprise is to give us the sense that we can hold the whole world in our heads -- as an anthology of images. ※※※※To collect photographs is to collect the world. Movies and television programs light up walls, flicker, and go out; but with still photographs the image is also an object, lightweight, cheap to produce, easy to carry about, accumulate, store. In Godard’s Les Carabiniers (1963), two sluggish lumpen-peasants are lured into joining the King’s Army by the promise that they will be able to loot, rape, kill, or do whatever else they please to the enemy, and get rich. But the suitcase of booty that Michel-Ange and Ulysse triumphantly bring home, years later, to their wives turns out to contain only picture postcards, hundreds of them, of Monuments, Department Stores, Mammals, Wonders of Nature, Methods of Transport, Works of Art, and other classified treasures from around the globe. Godard’s gag vividly parodies the equivocal magic of the photographic image., Photographs are perhaps the most mysterious of all the objects that make up, and thicken, the environment we recognize as modern. Photographs really are experience captured, and the camera is the ideal arm of consciousness in its acquisitive mood. ※※※※To photograph is to appropriate the thing photographed. It means putting oneself into a certain relation to the world that feels like knowledge -- and, therefore, like power. A now notorious first fall into alienation, habituating people to abstract the world into printed words, is supposed to have engendered that surplus of Faustian energy and psychic damage needed to build modern, inorganic societies. But print seems a less treacherous form of leaching out the world, of turning it into a mental object, than photographic images, which now provide most of the knowledge people have about the look of the past and the reach of the present. What is written about a person or an event is frankly an interpretation, as are handmade visual statements, like paintings and drawings. Photographed images do not seem to be statements about the world so much as pieces of it, miniatures of reality that anyone can make or acquire. ※※※※Photographs, which fiddle with the scale of the world, themselves get reduced, blown up, cropped, retouched, doctored, tricked out. They age, plagued by the usual ills of paper objects; they disappear; they become valuable, and get bought and sold; they are reproduced. Photographs, which package the world, seem to invite packaging. They are stuck in albums, framed and set on tables, tacked on walls, projected as slides. Newspapers and magazines feature them; cops alphabetize them; museums exhibit them; publishers compile them. ※※※※For many decades the book has been the most influential way of arranging (and usually miniaturizing) photographs, thereby guaranteeing them longevity, if not immortality -- photographs are fragile objects, easily torn or mislaid -- and a wider public. The photograph in a book is, obviously, the image of an image. But since it is, to begin with, a printed, smooth object, a photograph loses much less of its essential quality when reproduced in a book than a painting does. Still, the book is not a wholly satisfactory scheme for putting groups of photographs into general circulation. The sequence in which the photographs are to be looked at is proposed by the order of pages, but nothing holds readers to the recommended order or indicates the amount of time to be spent on each photograph. Chris Marker’s film, Si j’avais quatre dromadaires (1966), a brilliantly orchestrated meditation on photographs of all sorts and themes, suggests a subtler and more rigorous way of packaging (and enlarging) still photographs. Both the order and the exact time for looking at each photograph are imposed; and there is a gain in visual legibility and emotional impact. But photographs transcribed in a film cease to be collectable objects, as they still are when served up in books. ※※※※Photographs furnish evidence. Something we hear about, but doubt, seems proven when we’re shown a photograph of it. In one version of its utility, the camera record incriminates. Starting with their use by the Paris police in the murderous roundup of Communards in June 1871, photographs became a useful tool of modern states in the surveillance and control of their increasingly mobile populations. In another version of its utility, the camera record justifies. A photograph passes for incontrovertible proof that a given thing happened. The picture may distort; but there is always a presumption that something exists, or did exist, which is like what’s in the picture. Whatever the limitations (through amateurism) or pretensions (through artistry) of the individual photographer, a photograph -- any photograph -- seems to have a more innocent, and therefore more accurate, relation to visible reality than do other mimetic objects. Virtuosi of the noble image like Alfred Stieglitz and Paul Strand, composing mighty, unforgettable photographs decade after
decade, still want, first of all, to show something “out there,” just like the Polaroid owner for whom photographs are a handy, fast form of note-taking, or the shutterbug with a Brownie who takes snapshots as souvenirs of daily life. ※※※※While a painting or a prose description can never be other than a narrowly selective interpretation, a photograph can be treated as a narrowly selective transparency. But despite the presumption of veracity that gives all photographs authority, interest, seductiveness, the work that photographers do is no generic exception to the usually shady commerce between art and truth. Even when photographers are most concerned with mirroring reality, they are still haunted by tacit imperatives of taste and conscience. The immensely gifted members of the Farm Security Administration photographic project of the late 1930s (among them Walker Evans, Dorothea Lange, Ben Shahn, Russell Lee) would take dozens of frontal pictures of one of their sharecropper subjects until satisfied that they had gotten just the right look on film -- the precise expression on the subject’s face that supported their own notions about poverty, light, dignity, texture, exploitation, and geometry. In deciding how a picture should look, in preferring one exposure to another, photographers are always imposing standards on their subjects. Although there is a sense in which the camera does indeed capture reality, not just interpret it, photographs are as much an interpretation of the world as paintings and drawings are. Those occasions when the taking of photographs is relatively undiscriminating, promiscuous, or self-effacing do not lessen the didacticism of the whole enterprise. This very passivity -- and ubiquity -- of the photographic record is photography’s “message,” its aggression. ※※※※Images which idealize (like most fashion and animal photography) are no less aggressive than work which makes a virtue of plainness (like class pictures, still lifes of the bleaker sort, and mug shots). There is an aggression implicit in every use of the camera. This is as evident in the 1840s and 1850s, photography’s glorious first two decades, as in all the succeeding decades, during which technology made possible an ever increasing spread of that mentality which looks at the world as a set of potential photographs. Even for such early masters as David Octavius Hill and Julia Margaret Cameron who used the camera as a means of getting painterly images, the point of taking photographs was a vast departure from the aims of painters. From its start, photography implied the capture of the largest possible number of subjects. Painting never had so imperial a scope. The subsequent industrialization of camera technology only carried out a promise inherent in photography from its very beginning: to democratize all experiences by translating them into images. ※※※※That age when taking photographs required a cumbersome and expensive contraption -- the toy of the clever, the wealthy, and the obsessed -- seems remote indeed from the era of sleek pocket cameras that invite anyone to take pictures. The first cameras, made in France and England in the early 1840s, had only inventors and buffs to operate them. Since there were then no professional photographers, there could not be amateurs either, and taking photographs had no clear social use; it was a gratuitous, that is, an artistic activity, though with few pretensions to being an art. It was only with its industrialization that photography came into its own as art. As industrialization provided social uses for the operations of the photographer, so the reaction against these uses reinforced the self-consciousness of photography-as-art.
“To collect photographs is to collect the world.” 105
LUST Magazine
An Excerpt Plato’s Cave Written by Susan Sontage
Humankind lingers unregenerately in Plato’s cave, still reveling, its age-old habit, in mere images of the truth. But being educated by photographs is not like being educated by older, more artisanal images. For one thing, there are a great many more images around, claiming our attention. The inventory started in 1839 and since then just about everything has been photographed, or so it seems. This very insatiability of the photographing eye changes the terms of confinement in the cave, our world. In teaching us a new visual code, photographs alter and enlarge our notions of what is worth looking at and what we have a right to observe. They are a grammar and, even more importantly, an ethics of seeing. Finally, the most grandiose result of the photographic enterprise is to give us the sense that we can hold the whole world in our heads – as an anthology of images. To collect photographs is to collect the world. Movies and television programs light up walls, flicker, and go out; but with still photographs the image is also an object, lightweight, cheap to produce, easy to carry about, accumulate, store. In Godard’s Les Carabiniers (1963), two sluggish lumpen-peasants are lured into joining the King’s Army by the promise that they will be able to loot, rape, kill, or do whatever else they please to the enemy, and get rich. But the suitcase of booty that Michel-Ange and Ulysse triumphantly bring home, years later, to their wives turns out to contain only picture postcards, hundreds of them, of Monuments, Department Stores, Mammals, Wonders of Nature, Methods of Transport, Works of Art, and other classified treasures from around the globe. Godard’s gag vividly parodies the equivocal magic of the photographic image., Photographs are perhaps the most mysterious of all the objects that make up, and thicken, the environment we recognize as modern. Photographs really are experience captured, and the camera is the ideal arm of consciousness in its acquisitive mood.
On Photography To photograph is to appropriate the thing photographed. It means putting oneself into a certain relation to the world that feels like knowledge – and, therefore, like power. A now notorious first fall into alienation, habituating people to abstract the world into printed words, is supposed to have engendered that surplus of Faustian energy and psychic damage needed to build modern, inorganic societies. But print seems a less treacherous form of leaching out the world, of turning it into a mental object, than photographic images, which now provide most of the knowledge people have about the look of the past and the reach of the present. What is written about a person or an event is frankly an interpretation, as are handmade visual statements, like paintings and drawings. Photographed images do not seem to be statements about the world so much as pieces of it, miniatures of reality that anyone can make or acquire. Photographs, which fiddle with the scale of the world, themselves get reduced, blown up, cropped, retouched, doctored, tricked out. They age, plagued by the usual ills of paper objects; they disappear; they become valuable, and get bought and sold; they are reproduced. Photographs, which package the world, seem to invite packaging. They are stuck in albums, framed and set on tables, tacked on walls, projected as slides. Newspapers and magazines feature them; cops alphabetize them; museums exhibit them; publishers compile them. For many decades the book has been the most influential way of arranging (and usually miniaturizing) photo-
graphs, thereby guaranteeing them longevity, if not immortality – photographs are fragile objects, easily torn or mislaid – and a wider public. The photograph in a book is, obviously, the image of an image. But since it is, to begin with, a printed, smooth object, a photograph loses much less of its essential quality when reproduced in a book than a painting does. Still, the book is not a wholly satisfactory scheme for putting groups of photographs into general circulation. The sequence in which the photographs are to be looked at is proposed by the order of pages, but nothing holds readers to the recommended order or indicates the amount of time to be spent on each photograph. Chris Marker’s film, Si j’avais quatre dromadaires (1966), a brilliantly orchestrated meditation on photographs of all sorts and themes, suggests a subtler and more rigorous way of packaging (and enlarging) still photographs. Both the order and the exact time for looking at each photograph are imposed; and there is a gain in visual legibility and emotional impact. But photographs transcribed in a film cease to be collectable objects, as they still are when served up in books.
Photographs furnish evidence. Something we hear about, but doubt, seems proven when we’re shown
a photograph of it. In one version of its utility, the camera record incriminates. Starting with their use by the Paris police in the murderous roundup of Communards in June 1871, photographs became a useful tool of modern states in the surveillance and control of their increasingly mobile populations. In another version of its utility, the
“To collect photographs is to collect the world. Movies and television programs light up walls, flicker, and go out; but with still photographs the image is also an object, lightweight, cheap to pro duce, easy to carry about, accumulate, store.” camera record justifies. A photograph passes for incontrovertible proof that a given thing happened. The picture may distort; but there is always a presumption that something exists, or did exist, which is like what’s in the picture. Whatever the limitations (through amateurism) or pretensions (through artistry) of the individual photographer, a photograph – any photograph – seems to have a more innocent, and therefore more accurate, relation to visible reality than do other mimetic objects. Virtuosi of the noble image like Alfred Stieglitz and Paul Strand, composing mighty, unforgettable photographs decade after decade, still want, first of all, to show something “out there,” just like the Polaroid owner for whom photographs are a handy, fast form of note-taking, or the shutterbug with a Brownie who takes snapshots as souvenirs of daily life.
While a painting or a prose description can never be other than a narrowly selective interpretation, a photograph can be treated as a narrowly selective transparency. But despite the presumption of veracity that gives all photographs authority, interest, seductiveness, the work that photographers do is no generic exception to the usually shady commerce between art and truth. Even when photographers are most concerned with mirroring reality, they are still haunted by tacit imperatives of taste and conscience. The immensely gifted members of the Farm Security Administration photographic project of the late 1930s (among them Walker Evans, Dorothea Lange, Ben Shahn, Russell Lee) would take dozens of frontal pictures of one of their sharecropper subjects until satisfied that they had gotten just the right look on film – the precise expression on the subject’s face that supported their own notions about poverty, light, dignity, texture, exploitation, and geometry. In deciding how a picture should look, in preferring one exposure to another, photographers are always imposing standards on their subjects. Although there is a sense in which the camera does indeed capture reality, not just interpret it, photographs are as much an interpretation of the world as paintings and drawings are. Those occasions when the taking of photographs is relatively undiscriminating, promiscuous, or self-effacing do not lessen the didacticism of the whole enterprise. This very passivity – and ubiquity – of the photographic record is photography’s “message,” its aggression. Images which idealize (like most fashion and animal photography) are no less aggressive than work which makes a virtue of plainness (like class pictures, still lifes of the bleaker sort, and mug shots). There is an aggression implicit in every use of the camera. This is as evident in the 1840s and 1850s, photography’s glorious first two decades, as in all the succeeding decades, during which technology made possible an ever increasing spread of that mentality which looks at the world as a set of potential photographs. Even for such early masters as David Octavius Hill and Julia Margaret Cameron who used the camera as a means of getting painterly images, the point of taking photographs was a vast departure from the aims of painters. From its start, photography implied the capture of the largest possible number of subjects. Painting never had so imperial a scope. The subsequent industrialization of camera technology only carried out a promise inherent in photography from its very beginning: to democratize all experiences by translating them into images.
That age when taking photographs required a cumbersome and expensive contraption – the toy of the clever, the wealthy, and the obsessed – seems remote indeed from the era of sleek pocket cameras that invite anyone to take pictures. The first cameras, made in France and England in the early 1840s, had only inventors and buffs to operate them. Since there were then no professional photographers, there could not be amateurs either, and taking photographs had no clear social use; it was a gratuitous, that is, an artistic activity, though with few pretensions to being an art. It was only with its industrialization that photography came into its own as art. As industrialization provided social uses for the operations of the photographer, so the reaction against these uses reinforced the self-consciousness of photography-as-art.
19
LUST Magazine
An Excerpt Plato’s Cave Written by Susan Sontage
Humankind lingers unregenerately in Plato’s cave, still reveling, its age-old habit, in mere images of the truth. But being educated by photographs is not like being educated by older, more artisanal images. For one thing, there are a great many more images around, claiming our attention. The inventory started in 1839 and since then just about everything has been photographed, or so it seems. This very insatiability of the photographing eye changes the terms of confinement in the cave, our world. In teaching us a new visual code, photographs alter and enlarge our notions of what is worth looking at and what we have a right to observe. They are a grammar and, even more importantly, an ethics of seeing. Finally, the most grandiose result of the photographic enterprise is to give us the sense that we can hold the whole world in our heads – as an anthology of images. ※To collect photographs is to collect the world. Movies and television programs light up walls, flicker, and go out; but with still photographs the image is also an object, lightweight, cheap to produce, easy to carry about, accumulate, store. In Godard’s Les Carabiniers (1963), two sluggish lumpen-peasants are lured into joining the King’s Army by the promise that they will be able to loot, rape, kill, or do whatever else they please to the enemy, and get rich. But the suitcase of booty that Michel-Ange and Ulysse triumphantly bring home, years later, to their wives turns out to contain only picture postcards, hundreds of them, of Monuments, Department Stores, Mammals, Wonders of Nature, Methods of Transport, Works of Art, and other classified treasures from around the globe. Godard’s gag vividly parodies the equivocal magic of the photographic image., Photographs are perhaps the most mysterious of all the objects that make up, and thicken, the environment we recognize as modern. Photographs really are experience captured, and the camera is the ideal arm of consciousness in its acquisitive mood.
On Photography To photograph is to appropriate the thing photographed. It means putting oneself into a certain relation to the world that feels like knowledge – and, therefore, like power. A now notorious first fall into alienation, habituating people to abstract the world into printed words, is supposed to have engendered that surplus of Faustian energy and psychic damage needed to build modern, inorganic societies. But print seems a less treacherous form of leaching out the world, of turning it into a mental object, than photographic images, which now provide most of the knowledge people have about the look of the past and the reach of the present. What is written about a person or an event is frankly an interpretation, as are handmade visual statements, like paintings and drawings. Photographed images do not seem to be statements about the world so much as pieces of it, miniatures of reality that anyone can make or acquire.
Photographs, which fiddle with the scale of the world, themselves get reduced, blown up, cropped, retouched, doctored, tricked out. They age, plagued by the usual ills of paper objects; they disappear; they become valuable, and get bought and sold; they are reproduced. Photographs, which package the world, seem to invite packaging. They are stuck in albums, framed and set on tables, tacked on walls, projected as slides. Newspapers and magazines feature them; cops alphabetize them; museums exhibit them; publishers compile them. For many decades the book has been the most influential way of arranging (and usually miniaturizing) photographs, thereby guaranteeing them longevity, if not immortality – photographs are fragile objects, easily torn or mislaid – and a wider public. The photograph in a book is, obviously, the image of an image. But since it is, to begin with, a printed, smooth object, a photograph loses much less of its essential quality when reproduced in a book than a painting does. Still, the book is not a wholly satisfactory scheme for putting groups of photographs into general circulation. The sequence in which the photographs are to be looked at is proposed by the order of pages, but nothing holds readers to the recommended order or indicates the amount of time to be spent on each photograph. Chris Marker’s film, Si j’avais quatre dromadaires (1966), a brilliantly orchestrated meditation on photographs of all sorts and themes, suggests a subtler and more rigorous way of packaging (and enlarging) still photographs. Both the order and the exact time for looking at each photograph are imposed; and there is a gain in visual legibility and emotional impact. But photographs transcribed in a film cease to be collectable objects, as they still are when served up in books. Photographs furnish evidence. Something we hear about, but doubt, seems proven when we’re shown a photograph of it. In one version of its utility, the camera record incriminates. Starting with their use by the Paris police in the murderous roundup of Communards in June 1871, photographs became a useful tool of modern states in the surveillance and control of their increasingly mobile populations. In another version of its utility, the camera record
“To collect photographs is to collect the world. Movies and television programs light up walls, flicker, and go out; but with still photographs the image is also an object, lightweight, cheap to pro duce, easy to carry about, accumulate, store.” justifies. A photograph passes for incontrovertible proof that a given thing happened. The picture may distort; but there is always a presumption that something exists, or did exist, which is like what’s in the picture. Whatever the limitations (through amateurism) or pretensions (through artistry) of the individual photographer, a photograph – any photograph – seems to have a more innocent, and therefore more accurate, relation to visible reality than do other mimetic objects. Virtuosi of the noble image like Alfred Stieglitz and Paul Strand, composing mighty, unforgettable photographs decade after decade, still want, first of all, to show something “out there,” just like the Polaroid owner for whom photographs are a handy, fast form of note-taking, or the shutterbug with a Brownie who takes snapshots as souvenirs of daily life. While a painting or a prose description can never be other than a narrowly selective interpretation, a photograph can be treated as a narrowly selective transparency. But despite the presumption of veracity that gives all photographs authority, interest, seductiveness, the work that photographers do is no generic exception to the usually shady commerce between art and truth. Even when photographers are most concerned with mirroring reality, they are still haunted by tacit imperatives of taste and conscience. The immensely gifted members of the Farm Security Administration photographic project of the late 1930s (among them Walker Evans, Dorothea Lange, Ben Shahn, Russell Lee) would take dozens of frontal pictures of one of their sharecropper subjects until satisfied that they had gotten just the right look on film – the precise expression on the subject’s face that supported their own notions about poverty, light, dignity, texture, exploitation, and geometry. In deciding how a picture should look, in preferring one exposure to another, photographers are always imposing standards on their subjects. Although there is a sense in which the camera does indeed capture reality, not just interpret it, photographs are as much an interpretation of the world as paintings and drawings are. Those occasions when the taking of photographs is relatively undiscriminating, promiscuous, or self-effacing do not lessen the didacticism of the whole enterprise. This very passivity – and ubiquity – of the photographic record is photography’s “message,” its aggression.
Images which idealize (like most fashion and animal photography) are no less aggressive than work which makes a virtue of plainness (like class pictures, still lifes of the bleaker sort, and mug shots). There is an aggression implicit in every use of the camera. This is as evident in the 1840s and 1850s, photography’s glorious first two decades, as in all the succeeding decades, during which technology made possible an ever increasing spread of that mentality which looks at the world as a set of potential photographs. Even for such early masters as David Octavius Hill and Julia Margaret Cameron who used the camera as a means of getting painterly images, the point of taking photographs was a vast departure from the aims of painters. From its start, photography implied the capture of the largest possible number of subjects. Painting never had so imperial a scope. The subsequent industrialization of camera technology only carried out a promise inherent in photography from its very beginning: to democratize all experiences by translating them into images. That age when taking photographs required a cumbersome and expensive contraption – the toy of the clever, the wealthy, and the obsessed – seems remote indeed from the era of sleek pocket cameras that invite anyone to take pictures. The first cameras, made in France and England in the early 1840s, had only inventors and buffs to operate them. Since there were then no professional photographers, there could not be amateurs either, and taking photographs had no clear social use; it was a gratuitous, that is, an artistic activity, though with few pretensions to being an art. It was only with its industrialization that photography came into its own as art. As industrialization provided social uses for the operations of the photographer, so the reaction against these uses reinforced the self-consciousness of photography-as-art.
19
LUST Magazine
An Excerpt Plato’s Cave Written by Susan Sontage
On Photography Humankind lingers unregenerately in Plato’s cave, still reveling, its age-old habit, in mere images of the truth. But being educated by photographs is not like being educated by older, more artisanal images. For one thing, there are a great many more images around, claiming our attention. The inventory started in 1839 and since then just about everything has been photographed, or so it seems. This very insatiability of the photographing eye changes the terms of confinement in the cave, our world. In teaching us a new visual code, photographs alter and enlarge our notions of what is worth looking at and what we have a right to observe. They are a grammar and, even more importantly, an ethics of seeing. Finally, the most grandiose result of the photographic enterprise is to give us the sense that we can hold the whole world in our heads – as an anthology of images. ※To collect photographs is to collect the world. Movies and television programs light up walls, flicker, and go out; but with still photographs the image is also an object, lightweight, cheap to produce, easy to carry about, accumulate, store. In Godard’s Les Carabiniers (1963), two sluggish lumpen-peasants are lured into joining the King’s Army by the promise that they will be able to loot, rape, kill, or do whatever else they please to the enemy, and get rich. But the suitcase of booty that Michel-Ange and Ulysse triumphantly bring home, years later, to their wives turns out to contain only picture postcards, hundreds of them, of Monuments, Department Stores, Mammals, Wonders of Nature, Methods of Transport, Works of Art, and other classified treasures from around the globe. Godard’s gag vividly parodies the equivocal magic of the photographic image., Photographs are perhaps the most mysterious of all the objects that make up, and thicken, the environment we recognize as modern. Photographs really are experience captured, and the camera is the ideal arm of consciousness in its acquisitive mood. To photograph is to appropriate the thing photographed. It means putting oneself into a certain relation to the world that feels like knowledge – and, therefore, like power. A now notorious first fall into alienation, habituating people to abstract the world into printed words, is supposed to have engendered that surplus of Faustian energy and psychic damage needed to build modern, inorganic societies. But print seems a less treacherous form of leaching out the world, of turning it into a mental object, than photographic images, which now provide most of the knowledge people have about the look of the past and the reach of the present. What is written about a person or an event is frankly an interpretation, as are handmade visual statements, like paintings and drawings. Photographed images do not seem to be statements about the world so much as pieces of it, miniatures of reality that anyone can make or acquire. Photographs, which fiddle with the scale of the world, themselves get reduced, blown up, cropped, retouched, doctored, tricked out. They age, plagued by the usual ills of paper objects; they disappear; they become valuable, and get bought and sold; they are reproduced. Photographs, which package the world, seem to invite packaging. They are stuck in albums, framed and set on tables, tacked on walls, projected as slides. Newspapers and magazines feature them; cops alphabetize them; museums exhibit them; publishers compile them. For many decades the book has been the most influential way of arranging (and usually miniaturizing) photographs, thereby guaranteeing them longevity, if not immortality – photographs are fragile objects, easily torn or mislaid – and a wider public. The photograph in a book is, obviously, the image of an image. But since it is, to begin with, a printed, smooth object, a photograph loses much less of its essential quality when reproduced in a book than a painting does. Still, the book is not a wholly satisfactory scheme for putting groups of photographs into general circulation. The sequence in which the photographs are to be looked at is proposed by the order of pages, but nothing holds readers to the recommended order or indicates the amount of time to be spent on each photograph. Chris Marker’s film, Si j’avais quatre dromadaires (1966), a brilliantly orchestrated meditation on photographs of all sorts and themes, suggests a subtler and more rigorous way of packaging (and enlarging) still photographs. Both the order and the exact time for looking at each photograph are imposed; and there is a gain in visual legibility and emotional impact. But photographs transcribed in a film cease to be collectable objects, as they still are when served up in books. Photographs furnish evidence. Something we hear about, but doubt, seems proven when we’re shown a photograph of it. In one version of its utility, the camera record incriminates. Starting with their use by the Paris police in the murderous roundup of Communards in June 1871, photographs became a useful tool of modern states in the surveillance and control of their increasingly mobile populations. In another version of its utility, the camera record
“To collect photographs is to collect the world. Movies and television programs light up walls, flicker, and go out; but with still photographs the image is also an object, lightweight, cheap to pro duce, easy to carry about, accumulate, store.” justifies. A photograph passes for incontrovertible proof that a given thing happened. The picture may distort; but there is always a presumption that something exists, or did exist, which is like what’s in the picture. Whatever the limitations (through amateurism) or pretensions (through artistry) of the individual photographer, a photograph – any photograph – seems to have a more innocent, and therefore more accurate, relation to visible reality than do other mimetic objects. Virtuosi of the noble image like Alfred Stieglitz and Paul Strand, composing mighty, unforgettable photographs decade after decade, still want, first of all, to show something “out there,” just like the Polaroid owner for whom photographs are a handy, fast form of note-taking, or the shutterbug with a Brownie who takes snapshots as souvenirs of daily life. While a painting or a prose description can never be other than a narrowly selective interpretation, a photograph can be treated as a narrowly selective transparency. But despite the presumption of veracity that gives all photographs authority, interest, seductiveness, the work that photographers do is no generic exception to the usually shady commerce between art and truth. Even when photographers are most concerned with mirroring reality, they are still haunted by tacit imperatives of taste and conscience. The immensely gifted members of the Farm Security Administration photographic project of the late 1930s (among them Walker Evans, Dorothea Lange, Ben Shahn, Russell Lee) would take dozens of frontal pictures of one of their sharecropper subjects until satisfied that they had gotten just the right look on film – the precise expression on the subject’s face that supported their own notions about poverty, light, dignity, texture, exploitation, and geometry. In deciding how a picture should look, in preferring one exposure to another, photographers are always imposing standards on their subjects. Although there is a sense in which the camera does indeed capture reality, not just interpret it, photographs are as much an interpretation of the world as paintings and drawings are. Those occasions when the taking of photographs is relatively undiscriminating, promiscuous, or self-effacing do not lessen the didacticism of the whole enterprise. This very passivity – and ubiquity – of the photographic record is photography’s “message,” its aggression.
Images which idealize (like most fashion and animal photography) are no less aggressive than work which makes a virtue of plainness (like class pictures, still lifes of the bleaker sort, and mug shots). There is an aggression implicit in every use of the camera. This is as evident in the 1840s and 1850s, photography’s glorious first two decades, as in all the succeeding decades, during which technology made possible an ever increasing spread of that mentality which looks at the world as a set of potential photographs. Even for such early masters as David Octavius Hill and Julia Margaret Cameron who used the camera as a means of getting painterly images, the point of taking photographs was a vast departure from the aims of painters. From its start, photography implied the capture of the largest possible number of subjects. Painting never had so imperial a scope. The subsequent industrialization of camera technology only carried out a promise inherent in photography from its very beginning: to democratize all experiences by translating them into images. That age when taking photographs required a cumbersome and expensive contraption – the toy of the clever, the wealthy, and the obsessed – seems remote indeed from the era of sleek pocket cameras that invite anyone to take pictures. The first cameras, made in France and England in the early 1840s, had only inventors and buffs to operate them. Since there were then no professional photographers, there could not be amateurs either, and taking photographs had no clear social use; it was a gratuitous, that is, an artistic activity, though with few pretensions to being an art. It was only with its industrialization that photography came into its own as art. As industrialization provided social uses for the operations of the photographer, so the reaction against these uses reinforced the self-consciousness of photography-as-art.
19
LUST Magazine
Written by Susan Sontage
An Excerpt Plato’s Cave Humankind lingers unregenerately in Plato’s cave, still reveling, its age-old habit, in mere images of the truth. But being educated by photographs is not like being educated by older, more artisanal images. For one thing, there are a great many more images around, claiming our attention. The inventory started in 1839 and since then just about everything has been photographed, or so it seems. This very insatiability of the photographing eye changes the terms of confinement in the cave, our world. In teaching us a new visual code, photographs alter and enlarge our notions of what is worth looking at and what we have a right to observe. They are a grammar and, even more importantly, an ethics of seeing. Finally, the most grandiose result of the photographic enterprise is to give us the sense that we can hold the whole world in our heads – as an anthology of images. ※To collect photographs is to collect the world. Movies and television programs light up walls, flicker, and go out; but with still photographs the image is also an object, lightweight, cheap to produce, easy to carry about, accumulate, store. In Godard’s Les Carabiniers (1963), two sluggish lumpen-peasants are lured into joining the King’s Army by the promise that they will be able to loot, rape, kill, or do whatever else they please to the enemy, and get rich. But the suitcase of booty that Michel-Ange and Ulysse triumphantly bring home, years later, to their wives turns out to contain only picture postcards, hundreds of them, of Monuments, Department Stores, Mammals, Wonders of Nature, Methods of Transport, Works of Art, and other classified treasures from around the globe. Godard’s gag vividly parodies the equivocal magic of the photographic image., Photographs are perhaps the most mysterious of all the objects that make up, and thicken, the environment we recognize as modern. Photographs really are experience captured, and the camera is the ideal arm of consciousness in its acquisitive mood. To photograph is to appropriate the thing photographed. It means putting oneself into a certain relation to the world that feels like knowledge – and, therefore, like power. A now notorious first fall into alienation, habituating people to abstract the world into printed words, is supposed to have engendered that surplus of Faustian energy and psychic damage needed to build modern, inorganic societies. But print seems a less treacherous form of leaching out the world, of turning it into a mental object, than photographic images, which now provide most of the knowledge people have about the look of the past and the reach of the present. What is written about a person or an event is frankly an interpretation, as are handmade visual statements, like paintings and drawings. Photographed images do not seem to be statements about the world so much as pieces of it, miniatures of reality that anyone can make or acquire.
On Photography Photographs, which fiddle with the scale of the world, themselves get reduced, blown up, cropped, retouched, doctored, tricked out. They age, plagued by the usual ills of paper objects; they disappear; they become valuable, and get bought and sold; they are reproduced. Photographs, which package the world, seem to invite packaging. They are stuck in albums, framed and set on tables, tacked on walls, projected as slides. Newspapers and magazines feature them; cops alphabetize them; museums exhibit them; publishers compile them.
For many decades the book has been the most influential way of arranging (and usually miniaturizing) photographs, thereby guaranteeing them longevity, if not immortality – photographs are fragile objects, easily torn or mislaid – and a wider public. The photograph in a book is, obviously, the image of an image. But since it is, to begin with, a printed, smooth object, a photograph loses much less of its essential quality when reproduced in a book than a painting does. Still, the book is not a wholly satisfactory scheme for putting groups of photographs into general circulation. The sequence in which the photographs are to be looked at is proposed by the order of pages, but nothing holds readers to the recommended order or indicates the amount of time to be spent on each photograph. Chris Marker’s film, Si j’avais quatre dromadaires (1966), a brilliantly orchestrated meditation on photographs of all sorts and themes, suggests a subtler and more rigorous way of packaging (and enlarging) still photographs. Both the order and the exact time for looking at each photograph are imposed; and there is a gain in visual legibility and emotional impact. But photographs transcribed in a film cease to be collectable objects, as they still are when served up in books. Photographs furnish evidence. Something we hear about, but doubt, seems proven when we’re shown a photograph of it. In one version of its utility, the camera record incriminates. Starting with their use by the Paris police in the murderous roundup of Communards in June 1871, photographs became a useful tool of modern states in the surveillance and control of their increasingly mobile populations. In another version of its utility, the camera record
“To collect photographs is to collect the world. Movies and television programs light up walls, flicker, and go out; but with still photographs the image is also an object, lightweight, cheap to pro duce, easy to carry about, accumulate, store.” justifies. A photograph passes for incontrovertible proof that a given thing happened. The picture may distort; but there is always a presumption that something exists, or did exist, which is like what’s in the picture. Whatever the limitations (through amateurism) or pretensions (through artistry) of the individual photographer, a photograph – any photograph – seems to have a more innocent, and therefore more accurate, relation to visible reality than do other mimetic objects. Virtuosi of the noble image like Alfred Stieglitz and Paul Strand, composing mighty, unforgettable photographs decade after decade, still want, first of all, to show something “out there,” just like the Polaroid owner for whom photographs are a handy, fast form of note-taking, or the shutterbug with a Brownie who takes snapshots as souvenirs of daily life. While a painting or a prose description can never be other than a narrowly selective interpretation, a photograph can be treated as a narrowly selective transparency. But despite the presumption of veracity that gives all photographs authority, interest, seductiveness, the work that photographers do is no generic exception to the usually shady commerce between art and truth. Even when photographers are most concerned with mirroring reality, they are still haunted by tacit imperatives of taste and conscience. The immensely gifted members of the Farm Security Administration photographic project of the late 1930s (among them Walker Evans, Dorothea Lange, Ben Shahn, Russell Lee) would take dozens of frontal pictures of one of their sharecropper subjects until satisfied that they had gotten just the right look on film – the precise expression on the subject’s face that supported their own notions about poverty, light, dignity, texture, exploitation, and geometry. In deciding how a picture should look, in preferring one exposure to another, photographers are always imposing standards on their subjects. Although there is a sense in which the camera does indeed capture reality, not just interpret it, photographs are as much an interpretation of the world as paintings and drawings are. Those occasions when the taking of photographs is relatively undiscriminating, promiscuous, or self-effacing do not lessen the didacticism of the whole enterprise. This very passivity – and ubiquity – of the photographic record is photography’s “message,” its aggression.
Images which idealize (like most fashion and animal photography) are no less aggressive than work which makes a virtue of plainness (like class pictures, still lifes of the bleaker sort, and mug shots). There is an aggression implicit in every use of the camera. This is as evident in the 1840s and 1850s, photography’s glorious first two decades, as in all the succeeding decades, during which technology made possible an ever increasing spread of that mentality which looks at the world as a set of potential photographs. Even for such early masters as David Octavius Hill and Julia Margaret Cameron who used the camera as a means of getting painterly images, the point of taking photographs was a vast departure from the aims of painters. From its start, photography implied the capture of the largest possible number of subjects. Painting never had so imperial a scope. The subsequent industrialization of camera technology only carried out a promise inherent in photography from its very beginning: to democratize all experiences by translating them into images. That age when taking photographs required a cumbersome and expensive contraption – the toy of the clever, the wealthy, and the obsessed – seems remote indeed from the era of sleek pocket cameras that invite anyone to take pictures. The first cameras, made in France and England in the early 1840s, had only inventors and buffs to operate them. Since there were then no professional photographers, there could not be amateurs either, and taking photographs had no clear social use; it was a gratuitous, that is, an artistic activity, though with few pretensions to being an art. It was only with its industrialization that photography came into its own as art. As industrialization provided social uses for the operations of the photographer, so the reaction against these uses reinforced the self-consciousness of photography-as-art.
19
LUST Magazine
An Excerpt Plato’s Cave Written by Susan Sontage
On Photography Humankind lingers unregenerately in Plato’s cave, still reveling, its age-old habit, in mere images of the truth. But being educated by photographs is not like being educated by older, more artisanal images. For one thing, there are a great many more images around, claiming our attention. The inventory started in 1839 and since then just about everything has been photographed, or so it seems. This very insatiability of the photographing eye changes the terms of confinement in the cave, our world. In teaching us a new visual code, photographs alter and enlarge our notions of what is worth looking at and what we have a right to observe. They are a grammar and, even more importantly, an ethics of seeing. Finally, the most grandiose result of the photographic enterprise is to give us the sense that we can hold the whole world in our heads – as an anthology of images. ※To collect photographs is to collect the world. Movies and television programs light up walls, flicker, and go out; but with still photographs the image is also an object, lightweight, cheap to produce, easy to carry about, accumulate, store. In Godard’s Les Carabiniers (1963), two sluggish lumpen-peasants are lured into joining the King’s Army by the promise that they will be able to loot, rape, kill, or do whatever else they please to the enemy, and get rich. But the suitcase of booty that Michel-Ange and Ulysse triumphantly bring home, years later, to their wives turns out to contain only picture postcards, hundreds of them, of Monuments, Department Stores, Mammals, Wonders of Nature, Methods of Transport, Works of Art, and other classified treasures from around the globe. Godard’s gag vividly parodies the equivocal magic of the photographic image., Photographs are perhaps the most mysterious of all the objects that make up, and thicken, the environment we recognize as modern. Photographs really are experience captured, and the camera is the ideal arm of consciousness in its acquisitive mood. To photograph is to appropriate the thing photographed. It means putting oneself into a certain relation to the world that feels like knowledge – and, therefore, like power. A now notorious first fall into alienation, habituating people to abstract the world into printed words, is supposed to have engendered that surplus of Faustian energy and psychic damage needed to build modern, inorganic societies. But print seems a less treacherous form of leaching out the world, of turning it into a mental object, than photographic images, which now provide most of the knowledge people have about the look of the past and the reach of the present. What is written about a person or an event is frankly an interpretation, as are handmade visual statements, like paintings and drawings. Photographed images do not seem to be statements about the world so much as pieces of it, miniatures of reality that anyone can make or acquire. Photographs, which fiddle with the scale of the world, themselves get reduced, blown up, cropped, retouched, doctored, tricked out. They age, plagued by the usual ills of paper objects; they disappear; they become valuable, and get bought and sold; they are reproduced. Photographs, which package the world, seem to invite packaging. They are stuck in albums, framed and set on tables, tacked on walls, projected as slides. Newspapers and magazines feature them; cops alphabetize them; museums exhibit them; publishers compile them. For many decades the book has been the most influential way of arranging (and usually miniaturizing) photographs, thereby guaranteeing them longevity, if not immortality – photographs are fragile objects, easily torn or mislaid – and a wider public. The photograph in a book is, obviously, the image of an image. But since it is, to begin with, a printed, smooth object, a photograph loses much less of its essential quality when reproduced in a book than a painting does. Still, the book is not a wholly satisfactory scheme for putting groups of photographs into general circulation. The sequence in which the photographs are to be looked at is proposed by the order of pages, but nothing holds readers to the recommended order or indicates the amount of time to be spent on each photograph. Chris Marker’s film, Si j’avais quatre dromadaires (1966), a brilliantly orchestrated meditation on photographs of all sorts and themes, suggests a subtler and more rigorous way of packaging (and enlarging) still photographs. Both the order and the exact time for looking at each photograph are imposed; and there is a gain in visual legibility and emotional impact. But photographs transcribed in a film cease to be collectable objects, as they still are when served up in books. Photographs furnish evidence. Something we hear about, but doubt, seems proven when we’re shown a photograph of it. In one version of its utility, the camera record incriminates. Starting with their use by the Paris police in the murderous roundup of Communards in June 1871, photographs became a useful tool of modern states in the surveillance and control of their increasingly mobile populations. In another version of its utility, the camera record
“To collect photographs is to collect the world. Movies and television programs light up walls, flicker, and go out; but with still photographs the image is also an object, lightweight, cheap to pro duce, easy to carry about, accumulate, store.” justifies. A photograph passes for incontrovertible proof that a given thing happened. The picture may distort; but there is always a presumption that something exists, or did exist, which is like what’s in the picture. Whatever the limitations (through amateurism) or pretensions (through artistry) of the individual photographer, a photograph – any photograph – seems to have a more innocent, and therefore more accurate, relation to visible reality than do other mimetic objects. Virtuosi of the noble image like Alfred Stieglitz and Paul Strand, composing mighty, unforgettable photographs decade after decade, still want, first of all, to show something “out there,” just like the Polaroid owner for whom photographs are a handy, fast form of note-taking, or the shutterbug with a Brownie who takes snapshots as souvenirs of daily life. While a painting or a prose description can never be other than a narrowly selective interpretation, a photograph can be treated as a narrowly selective transparency. But despite the presumption of veracity that gives all photographs authority, interest, seductiveness, the work that photographers do is no generic exception to the usually shady commerce between art and truth. Even when photographers are most concerned with mirroring reality, they are still haunted by tacit imperatives of taste and conscience. The immensely gifted members of the Farm Security Administration photographic project of the late 1930s (among them Walker Evans, Dorothea Lange, Ben Shahn, Russell Lee) would take dozens of frontal pictures of one of their sharecropper subjects until satisfied that they had gotten just the right look on film – the precise expression on the subject’s face that supported their own notions about poverty, light, dignity, texture, exploitation, and geometry. In deciding how a picture should look, in preferring one exposure to another, photographers are always imposing standards on their subjects. Although there is a sense in which the camera does indeed capture reality, not just interpret it, photographs are as much an interpretation of the world as paintings and drawings are. Those occasions when the taking of photographs is relatively undiscriminating, promiscuous, or self-effacing do not lessen the didacticism of the whole enterprise. This very passivity – and ubiquity – of the photographic record is photography’s “message,” its aggression.
Images which idealize (like most fashion and animal photography) are no less aggressive than work which makes a virtue of plainness (like class pictures, still lifes of the bleaker sort, and mug shots). There is an aggression implicit in every use of the camera. This is as evident in the 1840s and 1850s, photography’s glorious first two decades, as in all the succeeding decades, during which technology made possible an ever increasing spread of that mentality which looks at the world as a set of potential photographs. Even for such early masters as David Octavius Hill and Julia Margaret Cameron who used the camera as a means of getting painterly images, the point of taking photographs was a vast departure from the aims of painters. From its start, photography implied the capture of the largest possible number of subjects. Painting never had so imperial a scope. The subsequent industrialization of camera technology only carried out a promise inherent in photography from its very beginning: to democratize all experiences by translating them into images. That age when taking photographs required a cumbersome and expensive contraption – the toy of the clever, the wealthy, and the obsessed – seems remote indeed from the era of sleek pocket cameras that invite anyone to take pictures. The first cameras, made in France and England in the early 1840s, had only inventors and buffs to operate them. Since there were then no professional photographers, there could not be amateurs either, and taking photographs had no clear social use; it was a gratuitous, that is, an artistic activity, though with few pretensions to being an art. It was only with its industrialization that photography came into its own as art. As industrialization provided social uses for the operations of the photographer, so the reaction against these uses reinforced the self-consciousness of photography-as-art.
19
LUST Magazine
An Excerpt Plato’s Cave Written by Susan Sontage
On Photography Humankind lingers unregenerately in Plato’s cave, still reveling, its age-old habit, in mere images of the truth. But being educated by photographs is not like being educated by older, more artisanal images. For one thing, there are a great many more images around, claiming our attention. The inventory started in 1839 and since then just about everything has been photographed, or so it seems. This very insatiability of the photographing eye changes the terms of confinement in the cave, our world. In teaching us a new visual code, photographs alter and enlarge our notions of what is worth looking at and what we have a right to observe. They are a grammar and, even more importantly, an ethics of seeing. Finally, the most grandiose result of the photographic enterprise is to give us the sense that we can hold the whole world in our heads – as an anthology of images. ※To collect photographs is to collect the world. Movies and television programs light up walls, flicker, and go out; but with still photographs the image is also an object, lightweight, cheap to produce, easy to carry about, accumulate, store. In Godard’s Les Carabiniers (1963), two sluggish lumpen-peasants are lured into joining the King’s Army by the promise that they will be able to loot, rape, kill, or do whatever else they please to the enemy, and get rich. But the suitcase of booty that Michel-Ange and Ulysse triumphantly bring home, years later, to their wives turns out to contain only picture postcards, hundreds of them, of Monuments, Department Stores, Mammals, Wonders of Nature, Methods of Transport, Works of Art, and other classified treasures from around the globe. Godard’s gag vividly parodies the equivocal magic of the photographic image., Photographs are perhaps the most mysterious of all the objects that make up, and thicken, the environment we recognize as modern. Photographs really are experience captured, and the camera is the ideal arm of consciousness in its acquisitive mood. To photograph is to appropriate the thing photographed. It means putting oneself into a certain relation to the world that feels like knowledge – and, therefore, like power. A now notorious first fall into alienation, habituating people to abstract the world into printed words, is supposed to have engendered that surplus of Faustian energy and psychic damage needed to build modern, inorganic societies. But print seems a less treacherous form of leaching out the world, of turning it into a mental object, than photographic images, which now provide most of the knowledge people have about the look of the past and the reach of the present. What is written about a person or an event is frankly an interpretation, as are handmade visual statements, like paintings and drawings. Photographed images do not seem to be statements about the world so much as pieces of it, miniatures of reality that anyone can make or acquire. Photographs, which fiddle with the scale of the world, themselves get reduced, blown up, cropped, retouched, doctored, tricked out. They age, plagued by the usual ills of paper objects; they disappear; they become valuable, and get bought and sold; they are reproduced. Photographs, which package the world, seem to invite packaging. They are stuck in albums, framed and set on tables, tacked on walls, projected as slides. Newspapers and magazines feature them; cops alphabetize them; museums exhibit them; publishers compile them. For many decades the book has been the most influential way of arranging (and usually miniaturizing) photographs, thereby guaranteeing them longevity, if not immortality – photographs are fragile objects, easily torn or mislaid – and a wider public. The photograph in a book is, obviously, the image of an image. But since it is, to begin with, a printed, smooth object, a photograph loses much less of its essential quality when reproduced in a book than a painting does. Still, the book is not a wholly satisfactory scheme for putting groups of photographs into general circulation. The sequence in which the photographs are to be looked at is proposed by the order of pages, but nothing holds readers to the recommended order or indicates the amount of time to be spent on each photograph. Chris Marker’s film, Si j’avais quatre dromadaires (1966), a brilliantly orchestrated meditation on photographs of all sorts and themes, suggests a subtler and more rigorous way of packaging (and enlarging) still photographs. Both the order and the exact time for looking at each photograph are imposed; and there is a gain in visual legibility and emotional impact. But photographs transcribed in a film cease to be collectable objects, as they still are when served up in books. Photographs furnish evidence. Something we hear about, but doubt, seems proven when we’re shown a photograph of it. In one version of its utility, the camera record incriminates. Starting with their use by the Paris police in the murderous roundup of Communards in June 1871, photographs became a useful tool of modern states in the surveillance and control of their increasingly mobile populations. In another version of its utility, the camera record
“To collect photographs is to collect the world. Movies and television programs light up walls, flicker, and go out; but with still photographs the image is also an object, lightweight, cheap to pro duce, easy to carry about, accumulate, store.” justifies. A photograph passes for incontrovertible proof that a given thing happened. The picture may distort; but there is always a presumption that something exists, or did exist, which is like what’s in the picture. Whatever the limitations (through amateurism) or pretensions (through artistry) of the individual photographer, a photograph – any photograph – seems to have a more innocent, and therefore more accurate, relation to visible reality than do other mimetic objects. Virtuosi of the noble image like Alfred Stieglitz and Paul Strand, composing mighty, unforgettable photographs decade after decade, still want, first of all, to show something “out there,” just like the Polaroid owner for whom photographs are a handy, fast form of note-taking, or the shutterbug with a Brownie who takes snapshots as souvenirs of daily life. While a painting or a prose description can never be other than a narrowly selective interpretation, a photograph can be treated as a narrowly selective transparency. But despite the presumption of veracity that gives all photographs authority, interest, seductiveness, the work that photographers do is no generic exception to the usually shady commerce between art and truth. Even when photographers are most concerned with mirroring reality, they are still haunted by tacit imperatives of taste and conscience. The immensely gifted members of the Farm Security Administration photographic project of the late 1930s (among them Walker Evans, Dorothea Lange, Ben Shahn, Russell Lee) would take dozens of frontal pictures of one of their sharecropper subjects until satisfied that they had gotten just the right look on film – the precise expression on the subject’s face that supported their own notions about poverty, light, dignity, texture, exploitation, and geometry. In deciding how a picture should look, in preferring one exposure to another, photographers are always imposing standards on their subjects. Although there is a sense in which the camera does indeed capture reality, not just interpret it, photographs are as much an interpretation of the world as paintings and drawings are. Those occasions when the taking of photographs is relatively undiscriminating, promiscuous, or self-effacing do not lessen the didacticism of the whole enterprise. This very passivity – and ubiquity – of the photographic record is photography’s “message,” its aggression.
Images which idealize (like most fashion and animal photography) are no less aggressive than work which makes a virtue of plainness (like class pictures, still lifes of the bleaker sort, and mug shots). There is an aggression implicit in every use of the camera. This is as evident in the 1840s and 1850s, photography’s glorious first two decades, as in all the succeeding decades, during which technology made possible an ever increasing spread of that mentality which looks at the world as a set of potential photographs. Even for such early masters as David Octavius Hill and Julia Margaret Cameron who used the camera as a means of getting painterly images, the point of taking photographs was a vast departure from the aims of painters. From its start, photography implied the capture of the largest possible number of subjects. Painting never had so imperial a scope. The subsequent industrialization of camera technology only carried out a promise inherent in photography from its very beginning: to democratize all experiences by translating them into images. That age when taking photographs required a cumbersome and expensive contraption – the toy of the clever, the wealthy, and the obsessed – seems remote indeed from the era of sleek pocket cameras that invite anyone to take pictures. The first cameras, made in France and England in the early 1840s, had only inventors and buffs to operate them. Since there were then no professional photographers, there could not be amateurs either, and taking photographs had no clear social use; it was a gratuitous, that is, an artistic activity, though with few pretensions to being an art. It was only with its industrialization that photography came into its own as art. As industrialization provided social uses for the operations of the photographer, so the reaction against these uses reinforced the self-consciousness of photography-as-art.
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Volume 35 Fall 2017
Alluring LUST Magazine
Ellen von Unwerth for Royalty Fame
Photography by Ellen von Unwerth
Freedom Written by Rebecca Rapp
Ellen von Unwerth is one of the most influential fashion photographers alive today. Her unmistakable aesthetic blends beautiful women, eroticism and a sense of playfulness with consummate skill. Her ability to get more from her subjects helps her to create alternate realities where things are just that little bit more free and fun. Her hedonistic teenage years spent between circus tents and hippie communes remain a big aesthetic influence and she draws upon these experiences to weave narrative into her photography. Her ability to perfectly balance escapism with a sense of timeless glamour has led her to work for some of the world’s most renowned publications and luxurious brands.
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LUST Magazine
Claudia Schiffer 2102 Ellen von Unwerth. September 2012
“I think tha obsession technique male thing I would ra search for model or lo
at the with is a g. ather r a new ocation.”
Born in 1954 in Frankfurt, Germany, von Unwerth experienced a tough and testing childhood. At the age of two she tragically lost both her parents and spent many years moving around orphanages and foster homes in the city. Despite this turbulent upbringing, von Unwerth recalls that she had a positive outlook on life as far back as she can remember. In her book, Fräulein, she recalls that she had a sunny disposition. “I didn’t suffer too much,” she said. “In fact, I remember my childhood as being fairly happy”.
This ability to remain upbeat has served her well throughout her career and has become entrenched, stylistically, in her photography. Von Unwerth encourages her models to showcase their personalities: they come across as happy and engaging; the antithesis of the unobtainable trophies portrayed by many of her contemporaries. Her desire to showcase confidence and character can be traced back to her time as a professional model, a career she fell into by pure chance. After being spotted by a talent scout at university in Munich, she was asked to do a trial shoot for Bravo, a popular German teen magazine. It went well and she soon moved to Paris, working with influential photographers such as Guy Bourdin and Oliviero Toscani. She felt that a model was restricted to listening orders regarding her poses. Hence she held a camera and decided to work behind it since she had gained experience in the field. With this step, she could let the models show some creativity in poses. At this time she was being given essential insight about photography by a photographer whom she was living with. Only after a few years, she came in to the light by doing a shoot for GUESS, Claudia Schiffer as the model. Works by Von Unwerth have been featured in magazines, such as Vanity Fair, The Face, i-D, Interview, Twill, Arena and Vogue. In 1991, she received first prize at the International Festival of Fashion Photography.
By 1998, the American Photo Magazine listed her among the Most Important People in Photography. Since this time, she has been on the radar as being among the best female photographers with a natural talent to capture the sensuality of women. She was lucky that she experienced modeling herself and this part of her career aids her in understanding models’ minds, unlike photographers who lack this know-how and are on the other end of the bridge. Ellen Von Unwerth did not like the static positions of models, having to stand in a single pose for a really long time, so she reversed this culture at least in her photography. She promoted playful, kinetic and progressing gestures and poses in a model.
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LUST Magazine
Since the beginning of her career as an adult, she has been photographing or has been the subject of photography herself. In the industry, she is noted for her fashion photography because she pushes the limits female sexuality in photography in general and in fashion. She has created outstanding editorial pages for famous magazines. Additionally, she has made commercials and music videos. Hence she is not just a photographer but a director who specializes in femininity with eroticism. Like so many of her passions, von Unwerth’s introduction to photography occurred by happy accident. Her fixation began after a boyfriend at the time gave her a camera as a gift. After a brief lesson on the camera’s technical operation, she was soon photographing her friends and the places she travelled to through work. What started out as a hobby turned into obsession after Jill, a cult French fashion magazine from the early ’80s, published some of her travel shots of a trip to Kenya. She was soon contributing images to them on a regular basis.
Her early photography featured plenty of movement and energy and her mix of spontaneity and classical glamour soon attracted many admirers, including British designer Katharine Hamnett. Seeing her early images in Jill, Hamnett offered her work shooting an advertising campaign in 1989 and the resulting black and white images continued her street and reportage style. Later that year, she received her big break when she shot an advertising campaign for Guess with a German model, Claudia Schiffer. The sensual, sophisticated imagery was a departure for von Unwerth but the shoot would transform the fortunes of both women. It was widely seen as the moment the world was made aware of Schiffer, who would go on to become one of the most
Untitled 2016
Untitled 2016
successful supermodels of all time. This shoot announced von Unwerth to the fashion world and subsequently landed her a job shooting for Vogue Italia in 1990. As her reputation grew, her style developed. She blended the glamorous eroticism of Helmut Newton with a uniquely feminine view of sexuality. It exuded the necessary sophistication and opulence required for the glossy magazines, but underneath the surface was a suggestive irreverence that fitted the feel of the early ’90s perfectly.
Over the next 20 years, she continued to shoot powerful, intimate images of women for clients such as Playboy, Vanity Fair, GQ, Vogue and Agent Provocateur. Always choosing to focus on a model’s personality and sense of fun, her stylized photography managed to balance art and fantasy with sadomasochistic themes to create visceral, eye-catching imagery.
There are many reoccurring themes in von Unwerth’s work and a lot of her imagery tends to focus of the dual ideas of freedom and transformation. Although these powerful motifs are prominent throughout her career, they can be traced back to her formative teenage years. Soon after leaving foster care, von Unwerth relocated to Oberstdorf, a small town high up in the mountains to the south east of Munich. She and several friends started a hippie commune in an old farmhouse; she said of the time that “it was here that I started to enjoy my life.” With artists, performers and musicians from all over Europe passing through, a creative community began to emerge and this new group of people piqued her interest in unusual and non-conformist behavior. Although she didn’t realize it yet, the experiences she had during this time
Ellen Von Unwerth For Chantal Thomass Lingerie Spring/Summer 2014
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didn’t realize it yet, the experiences she had during this
– three cornerstones of modern fashion advertising.
time would become a central theme in her later photog-
Her inimitable use of sensual imagery has not only
raphy. This love of the alternative lifestyle was further
led to commercial and artistic success, but, in a
cemented when she began work at a circus in Munich
broader sense, it has altered the way female sexual-
in the early ’80s. Although it was only a brief period
ity is represented within fashion.
of employment, the bright lights, vibrant visuals and
“It’s not special any more to be a photographer,”
elaborate costumes stylistically significant in her later
she says. “Even when I take a picture, everybody stands
work. Many of her most enduring shoots, including
next to me and takes the same picture. Five minutes later
a Harper’s Bazaar editorial in 2015, feature the big
it’s on everyone else’s Instagram and I’m old news – so
top as a backdrop. For von Unwerth, the circus is a
I’m forced to take pictures on my iPhone too.” She tells
succinct visual metaphor, a subtle way to tell stories of
me she can usually tell the difference between a
escapism, freedom and transformation.
photograph a man has taken and one a woman has
Although widely known for her work in fashion, von
taken. “But I find it crazy how women photograph
Unwerth has also managed to establish herself as an
themselves all the time. When I was a girl and
internationally renowned photographer across a range of
looked in the mirror, my stepmother would come in
subject matters. Early in her career, she merged her love
and give me a slap. There was this idea that if you
of photography and music when she shot promotional
did that, the devil would get in you and steal your
imagery for British band Duran Duran’s 1990 album,
personality. Now everyone does this. I ask models
Liberty. She would continue to work with the group over
sometimes, ‘Do you have to take so many selfies?’ And
the next decade, shooting album covers and tour posters
they say: ‘Only when I take selfies do I get likes.’ It’s sad!
and even directing the video to their single, “Electric Bar-
Narcissism is so celebrated in our society, sometimes
barella”. As she established a reputation for herself, many
people lose interest in other people.”
more musicians sought her artistic guidance. Albums for
It is clear that everyone had a whole lot of giggles
Janet Jackson, Bananarama, All Saints, Britney Spears
in Bavaria. Von Unwerth motions towards an image
and Christina Aguilera soon followed. She has also
of three women topless on a sled: “This model is
worked extensively with Rihanna, most notably shooting
Miss Russia and she brought a lot of vodka to the
the covers of both Rated R and Talk That Talk.
shoot. So they were drinking behind my back in the
In a career that has spanned well over 25
Of course, the word I should have reached for was erotic. Or perhaps simply German. “Look at the scandal there was with Janet Jackson over here,” she says referring to the Super Bowl nipple slip of 2004. “It was a boob! It’s something you should be proud of and not hide. Especially if it’s nice. Ha ha ha ha! In Germany it is not like this. Even if you go to a park in Berlin in the summer, everybody is naked and playing frisbee. You would get arrested if you did that in LA.”
snow.” Von Unwerth is not much given to analysing.
years, Ellen von Unwerth has dramatically helped
When I allude to the “male gaze” she has no idea
shape the way women are portrayed on camera.
what I’m talking about. When I find myself grasping
Working in a profession dominated by men, her
for the word “pornography” she shoots back: “Have
unique approach to displaying sexuality has bro-
you ever seen a porno?” Well, one of your pictures
ken with convention and paved the way for many
does literally depict two people having sex in a hay-
female photographers.
loft. “It’s more inspired by a B-movie sense of camp.
As well as striking a different path to her male
I wouldn’t say porno.” (After our interview, one of
counterparts, her photography manages to capture
her assistants calls me to make sure that I don’t
the very essence of desire, eroticism and pleasure
think it’s pornographic.)
“But you see so many images that are dark and depressing at the moment. All these sad women being sad! So I figured, let’s show girls having fun and enjoying life.”
Katy Perry Portrait
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LUST Magazine
Photography by Richard Avedon
Extraordinary History Written by Rebecca Rapp
Richard Avedon for Harper’s Bazaar June 1961
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American photographer Richard Avedon was best known for his work in the fashion world and for his minimalist portraits. He worked first as a photographer for the Merchant Marines, taking identification photos. He then moved to fashion, shooting for Harper’s Bazaar and Vogue, demanding that his models convey emotion and movement, a departure from the norm of motionless fashion photography.Richard Avedon was born on May 15, 1923 in New York City. His mother, Anna Avedon, came from a family of dress manufacturers, and his father, Jacob Israel Avedon, owned a clothing store called Avedon’s Fifth Avenue. Inspired by his parents’ clothing businesses, as a boy Avedon took a great interest in fashion, especially enjoying photographing the clothes in his father’s store. At the age of 12, he joined the YMHA (Young Men’s Hebrew Association) Camera Club. Avedon later described one childhood moment in particular as helping to kindle his interest in fashion photography: “One evening my father and I were walking down Fifth Avenue looking at the store windows,” he remembered. “In front of the Plaza Hotel, I saw a bald man with a camera posing a very beautiful woman against a tree. He lifted his head, adjusted her dress a little bit and took some photographs. Later, I saw the picture in Harper’s Bazaar. I didn’t understand why he’d taken her against that tree until I got to Paris a few years later: the tree in front of the Plaza had that same peeling bark you see all over the Champs-Elysees.”Already established as one of the most talented young fashion photographers in the business, in 1955 Avedon made fashion and photography history when he staged a photo shoot at a circus. The iconic photograph of that shoot, “Dovima with Elephants,” features the most famous model of the time in a black Dior evening gown with a long white silk sash. She is posed between two elephants, her back serenely arched as she holds on to the trunk of one elephant while reaching out fondly toward the other. The image remains one of the most strikingly original and iconic fashion photographs of all time. “He asked me to do extraordinary things,” Dovima said of Avedon. “But I always knew I was going to be part of a great picture.”
Małgosia Bela and Gisele Bündchen, Dresses by Dior, New York, March 13, 2000
“But I always knew I was going to be part of a great picture.”
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LUST Magazine
Avedon served as a staff photographer for Harper’s Bazaar for 20 years, from 1945 to 1965. His black-and-white portraits were remarkable for capturing the essential humanity and vulnerability lurking in such larger-than-life figures as President Dwight D. Eisenhower, Marilyn Monroe, Bob Dylan and The Beatles. During the 1960s, Avedon also expanded into more explicitly political photography. Avedon left Harper’s Bazaar in 1965, and from 1966 to 1990 he worked as a photographer for Vogue. He continued to push the boundaries of fashion photography with surreal, provocative and often controversial pictures in which nudity, violence and death featured prominently. He also continued to take illuminating portraits of leading cultural and political figures. In addition to his work for Vogue, Avedon was also a driving force behind photography’s emergence as a legitimate art form during the 1960s, ‘70s and ‘80s. In 1959 he published a book of photographs, Observations, and in 1964 he published Nothing Personal, another collection of photographs. “I’ve photographed just about everyone in the world,” he said at the time. “But what I hope to do is photograph people of accomplishment, not celebrity, and help define the difference once again.” His last project for The New Yorker, which remained unfinished, was a portfolio entitled “Democracy” that included portraits of political leaders such as Karl Rove and John Kerry as well as ordinary citizens engaged in political and social activism.
Untitled 1960
Dovima with Elephants August 1955
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Untitled 1965
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Untitled 1955
LUST Magazine
Veruschka, dress by Kimberly, New York, January 4, 1967
“I’ve photo graphed just about everyone in the world.”
Untitled 19 55
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LUST Magazine
An Excerpt Plato’s Cave
Written by Susan Sontage
On Photography Humankind lingers unregenerately in Plato’s cave, still reveling, its age-old habit, in mere images of the truth.
But being educated by photographs is not like being educated by older, more artisanal images. For one thing, there are a great many more images around, claiming our attention. The inventory started in 1839 and since then just about everything has been photographed, or so it seems. This very insatiability of the photographing eye changes the terms of confinement in the cave, our world. In teaching us a new visual code, photographs alter and enlarge our notions of what is worth looking at and what we have a right to observe. They are a grammar and, even more importantly, an ethics of seeing. Finally, the most grandiose result of the photographic enterprise is to give us the sense that we can hold the whole world in our heads – as an anthology of images.
To collect photographs is to collect the world. Movies and television programs light up walls, flicker, and go out; but with still photographs the image is also an object, lightweight, cheap to produce, easy to carry about, accumulate, store. In Godard’s Les Carabiniers (1963), two sluggish lumpen-peasants are lured into joining the King’s Army by the promise that they will be able to loot, rape, kill, or do whatever else they please to the enemy, and get rich. But the suitcase of booty that Michel-Ange and Ulysse triumphantly bring home, years later, to their wives turns out to contain only picture postcards, hundreds of them, of Monuments, Department Stores, Mammals, Wonders of Nature, Methods of Transport, Works of Art, and other classified treasures from around the globe. Godard’s gag vividly parodies the equivocal magic of the photographic image., Photographs are perhaps the most mysterious of all the objects that make up, and thicken, the environment we recognize as modern. Photographs really are experience captured, and the camera is the ideal arm of consciousness in its acquisitive mood. To photograph is to appropriate the thing photographed. It means putting oneself into a certain relation to the world
that feels like knowledge – and, therefore, like power. A now notorious first fall into alienation, habituating people to abstract the world into printed words, is supposed to have engendered that surplus of Faustian energy and psychic damage needed to build modern, inorganic societies. But print seems a less treacherous form of leaching out the world, of turning it into a mental object, than photographic images, which now provide most of the knowledge people have about the look of the past and the reach of the present. What is written about a person or an event is frankly an interpretation, as are handmade visual statements, like paintings and drawings. Photographed images do not seem to be statements about the world so much as pieces of it, miniatures of reality that anyone can make or acquire.
Photographs, which fiddle with the scale of the world, themselves get reduced, blown up, cropped, retouched, doctored, tricked out. They age, plagued by the usual ills of paper objects; they disappear; they become valuable, and get bought and sold; they are reproduced. Photographs, which package the world, seem to invite packaging. They are stuck in albums, framed and set on tables, tacked on walls, projected as slides. Newspapers and magazines feature them; cops alphabetize them; museums exhibit them; publishers compile them. For many decades the book has been the most influential way of arranging (and usually miniaturizing) photographs, thereby guaranteeing them longevity, if not immortality – photographs are fragile objects, easily torn or mislaid – and a wider public. The photograph in a book is, obviously, the image of an image. But since it is, to begin with, a printed, smooth object, a photograph loses much less of its essential quality when reproduced in a book than a painting does. Still, the book is not a wholly satisfactory scheme for putting groups of photographs into general circulation. The sequence in which the photographs are to be looked at is proposed by the order of pages, but nothing holds readers to the recommended order or indicates the amount of time to be spent on each photograph. Chris Marker’s film, Si j’avais quatre dromadaires (1966), a brilliantly orchestrated meditation on photographs of all sorts and themes, suggests a subtler and more rigorous way of packaging (and enlarging) still photographs. Both the order and the exact time for looking at each photograph are imposed; and there is a gain in visual legibility and emotional impact. But photographs transcribed in a film cease to be collectable objects, as they still are when served up in books.
“To collect photographs is to collect the world. Movies and television programs light up walls, flicker, and go out; but with still photographs the image is also an object, lightweight, cheap to pro duce, easy to carry about, accumulate, store.” Photographs furnish evidence. Something we hear about, but doubt, seems proven when we’re shown a pho-
tograph of it. In one version of its utility, the camera record incriminates. Starting with their use by the Paris police in the murderous roundup of Communards in June 1871, photographs became a useful tool of modern states in the surveillance and control of their increasingly mobile populations. In another version of its utility, the camera record justifies. A photograph passes for incontrovertible proof that a given thing happened. The picture may distort; but there is always a presumption that something exists, or did exist, which is like what’s in the picture. Whatever the limitations (through amateurism) or pretensions (through artistry) of the individual photographer, a photograph – any photograph – seems to have a more innocent, and therefore more accurate, relation to visible reality than do other mimetic objects. Virtuosi of the noble image like Alfred Stieglitz and Paul Strand, composing mighty, unforgettable photographs decade after decade, still want, first of all, to show something “out there,” just like the Polaroid owner for whom photographs are a handy, fast form of note-taking, or the shutterbug with a Brownie who takes snapshots as souvenirs of daily life.
While a painting or a prose description can never be other than a narrowly selective interpretation, a photograph
can be treated as a narrowly selective transparency. But despite the presumption of veracity that gives all photographs authority, interest, seductiveness, the work that photographers do is no generic exception to the usually shady commerce between art and truth. Even when photographers are most concerned with mirroring reality, they are still haunted by tacit imperatives of taste and conscience. The immensely gifted members of the Farm Security Administration photographic project of the late 1930s (among them Walker Evans, Dorothea Lange, Ben Shahn, Russell Lee) would take dozens of frontal pictures of one of their sharecropper subjects until satisfied that they had gotten just the right look on film – the precise expression on the subject’s face that supported their own notions about poverty, light, dignity, texture, exploitation, and geometry. In deciding how a picture should look, in preferring one exposure to another, photographers are always imposing standards on their subjects. Although there is a sense in which the camera does indeed capture reality, not just interpret it, photographs are as much an interpretation of the world as paintings and drawings are. Those occasions when the taking of photographs is relatively undiscriminating, promiscuous, or self-effacing do not lessen the didacticism of the whole enterprise. This very passivity – and ubiquity – of the photographic record is photography’s “message,” its aggression.
Images which idealize (like most fashion and animal photography) are no less aggressive than work which makes a virtue of plainness (like class pictures, still lifes of the bleaker sort, and mug shots). There is an aggression implicit in every use of the camera. This is as evident in the 1840s and 1850s, photography’s glorious first two decades, as in all the succeeding decades, during which technology made possible an ever increasing spread of that mentality which looks at the world as a set of potential photographs. Even for such early masters as David Octavius Hill and Julia Margaret Cameron who used the camera as a means of getting painterly images, the point of taking photographs was a vast departure from the aims of painters. From its start, photography implied the capture of the largest possible number of subjects. Painting never had so imperial a scope. The subsequent industrialization of camera technology only carried out a promise inherent in photography from its very beginning: to democratize all experiences by translating them into images. That age when taking photographs required a cumbersome and expensive contraption – the toy of the clever, the wealthy, and the obsessed – seems remote indeed from the era of sleek pocket cameras that invite anyone to take pictures. The first cameras, made in France and England in the early 1840s, had only inventors and buffs to operate them. Since there were then no professional photographers, there could not be amateurs either, and taking photographs had no clear social use; it was a gratuitous, that is, an artistic activity, though with few pretensions to being an art. It was only with its industrialization that photography came into its own as art. As industrialization provided social uses for the operations of the photographer, so the reaction against these uses reinforced the self-consciousness of photography-as-art.
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LUST Magazine
Colophon: Lust Magazine was designed by Rebecca Rapp for Typographic Systems, 2017. All of the images and text were sourced from publications and the interent and are only being used for design education purposes. Fonts: Bodoni Poster, Bodoni Book, Bodoni Italic, ITC Century, Helvetica Neue Regular, Helvetica Neue Bold. Printed a Jayhawk Ink, Lawrence KS.
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