Fashion photography is an art form that accompanies most other forms of fashion media. Fashion photography is truly all over fashion media. It's in the magazines you're reading, it's on blogs, social media, advertising campaigns, etc. In an industry that focuses so much attention on visuals and aesthetics it only makes sense that photography is so important.
Fashion photography originally dates back to the 1800s in Victorian style portraits. During this time actresses, dancers, and others of a high social class would pose in their best garments for portraits. It wasn't until 1911 that the first real fashion photographs were taken by American photographer Edward Steichen. He photographed models in dresses by Paul Poiret and the images were then in the Art et Decoration magazine. Steichen is thought of today as the founding father of fashion photography.
Fashion photography really started to take off as magazines did. Fashion magazines like Vogue and Harper's Bazaar used to contain fashion illustrations, but then switched over to photography as advancements in printing allowed for them. This was where we started to see photographers like Richard Avedon, David Bailey, and Irving Penn. With so many different photographers coming into the space we also saw different trends and movements in photography like commercialism, hypersexualization, femininity, and street style photography.
Fashion photography is divided into two categories; commercial work and editorial work. Commercial work focuses on capturing a product or item in order to use it for marketing and advertising materials. Editorial work is typically the work you see in publications that conveys a mood or a story, rather than trying to sell you something.
Today things look a little different. Suddenly everyone and anyone can be a photographer. With so many people owning smartphones with high functioning cameras anyone can start taking their own images and posting them. People can then use social media like Instagram to build their own audiences and start working with major brands to create their own advertising campaigns. Below is one of influencer Tamara Kalinic's Instagram photos of a campaign she shot for Louis Vuitton.
With other developments over time with the camera have come lots of developments in editing as well. Today almost all of the images we see on magazines, advertisements, and social media are heavily edited. Suddenly an image can be transformed through editing and you can make the model have the most airbrushed skin and unrealistic body.
While some edits can be positive and lend themselves to furthering the creative process, lots are not so positive. The image below is a highly edited Ralph Lauren advertisement. The model who did not need editing to begin with has been edited to be an even smaller version of herself. Its images and editing like this that brings out a negative side of the fashion industry. A side where you're nothing beyond the way you look and compares women to an unrealistic standard for beauty. Within the past few years conversations about these harmful edits have been opening up and some photographers and models are even vowing to stop the edits that promote unrealistic standards.
Throughout the past year with COVID-19 fashion photography has had to evolve yet again. Photographers and models were not able to travel like in normal times so they had to get creative. They started doing photoshoots over facetime or had models create and style their own images at home. It will be interesting to see how photography evolves again as vaccinations continue and we hopefully enter a COVID free future.
