Fashion victims

ArtForum, May, 2004 by Peter Halley

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But when Kismaric and Respini attempt cultural analysis, things get really strange. To explain the genesis of '90s fashion photography, they try a classic gambit, arguing that fashion photography of the '90s erupted when "the genre moved away from the paradigm of an idealized and classic beauty toward a new vernacular allied with lifestyle, pop and youth culture, and the demimonde." However, after recounting the history of the vulgar and vernacular in the fashion photography of the '50s and '60s, they themselves disprove the idea that the '90s represented a break with any recent epoch of classic beauty. Then they try out another old saw, philosophizing that "the avant-garde had its usual effect" so that, "by 1990, sporadic but adventurous, racy, and highly individualistic bodies of work made for fifty years had coalesced into a trend that infiltrated the main body of the fashion photography world." So, in the end, it's those secret agents of the avant-garde who were responsible--even if it's hard to see how the trend infiltrated headquarters if it didn't make it onto the editorial pages of Vogue, Harper's Bazaar, or the other big-circulation magazines.

Although the curators emphasize the importance of '60s fashion photography to developments in the '90s, their narrative curiously omits many of the best fashion photographers of the earlier era. They talk about Avedon, praise the French photographer Guy Bourdin, and gratuitously diminish the importance of the late Helmut Newton (whom many younger photographers view as an influential role model) for introducing "the demimonde in all the right places: doctors' and dentists' offices, and on coffee tables." Yet Bob Richardson, James Moore, Jerry Schatzberg, and the other Americans who then worked for Vogue and Bazaar go unmentioned, even though they anticipated the strategies of the '90s by photographing in evocative locations borrowed from everyday life and appropriating camera angles and lighting from experimental film directors like Antonioni and Godard.

I would argue that Kismaric and Respini were obligated to omit this work because its presence would have undermined the central premise of "Fashioning Fiction": that fashion photography in the '90s was interesting if and only if it reflected the influence of art on fashion's sensibility. If the photography of Bob Richardson or James Moore enters the mix, one is obliged to consider its relationship to the work of Ellen von Unwerth and the other photographers using cinematic syntax instead of the influence of art-world models such as Sherman. But any acknowledgment of intertextual reference within fashion photography would validate its cultural legitimacy, threatening the premise that fashion photography must borrow from art in order to create valid meaning.

Ultimately the curators justify their approach by claiming that the "fashion world has turned to current trends in art photography," despite their talk of the multiple cultural intersections running through '90s fashion photography. Almost every detail of the exhibition colludes to support this view, especially their inclusion of six "art photographers" as half of the show. Perhaps this should be expected at the Museum of Modern Art, which is, after all, an institution devoted to the legitimacy and importance of art as a cultural practice. Yet since its founding in the '30s, MOMA has promoted broadening the self-conscious criticality of modern art to include practices previously considered degraded by their commercial economies, such as photography and design. The Modern was the first institution to propose that photography need not reference painting for legitimacy and that design could be viewed in terms of its own formal and functional conditions. Unfortunately Kismaric and Respini break with that willingness to award newly legitimized artistic practices their own internal aesthetic histories.