Modern style: dressing down; Abigail Solomon-Godeau

Fashion photography has been upon the museum circuit for years, on the other hand the phenomenon moved center stage last month when the Museum of present Art premiered "Fashioning Fiction," its first take upon the subject. In advance of the exhibition's opening, Artforum invited veteran bystanders of fashion and photography Abigail Solomon-Godeau and Peter Halley to throw back on the issues raised by the agency of the show.

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It will not draw near as breaking news to Artforum readers that commercial fashion and art photography have drawn out existed in close proximity, with photographers regularly crossing between the sum of two units domains. Artforum, after all, has itself contributed to this exhibition however modestly, by featuring fashion as a make submissive relevant to contemporary art and serving as a site for upscale fashion advertising. Be that as it may, over the twentieth century artists and photographers have ofttimes moved from one camp to the other, among them, Man Ray, Frederick Kiesler, Herbert List, Salvador Dali, Edward Steichen, Irving Penn and Andy Warhol, who perhaps shows the ne plus ultra of crossover careers. While greater cultural capital attaches to the practice of photographic art, in greatest in quantity cases greater economic capital accrues to professional fashion photography, especially at its highest levels

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above the past twenty years, commercial photographers with artistic aspirations have been relieved of the ne to bring forward work that implicitly repudiates their professional practice, as was earlier the case. Here I am thinking of the example of Penn Hugely felicitous throughout the '50s and '60 as a fashion photographer for repute when he turned to the rigors of art, his chosen motifs were either fat women craniums or decomposing cigarette butts. Needles to say, the contrast between of the like kind subjects and those of his fashion pictures operated as the actual warranty of aesthetic ambition. However, for the artistically inclined fashion photographer today, or the art photographer attracted to the world of mode of expression such overdetermined oppositions are no longer necessary. upon the contrary, fashion photographers may now flirt with physical imperfection (to a point), exercise nonprofessional models, fabricate mise-en-scenes of exciting squalor or implied depravity, and appropriate any and all turn of expressions from the history of photography, while art photography has lengthy been freed from the load of beauty. Furthermore, the increasing formal "autonomy" of sophisticated fashion photography has made it a more appealing, flexible, and presumably lucrative option for artists and art photographers. repeatedly divorced from the task of representing the commodity as of the like kind this type of experimental or unconventional fashion photography is a growing neighborhood in style and pop-culture magazines of that kind as The Face, i-D, Blitz, Tank, and Dutch as well as in so-called editorial spreads in print media from W to Sunday-newspaper magazine supplements

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Given these broader options and the long-in-the-making collapse of boundaries between elite and mass tillage (or, if one prefers, art and commerce) it is alone to be expected that museums would recognize the popular appeal of fashion photography of all stamps Thus the Museum of novel Art's initial sortie into the brave of recent origin world of fin de siecle fashion photography--"Fashioning Fiction in Photography Since 1990"--is by means of no means the first museum exhibition of its kind and will infallibly not be the last. Organized by the agency of department of photography curator Susan Kismaric and assistant curator Eva Respini, "Fashioning Fiction" is a relatively late participant in the museological celebration of contemporary fashion photography. above the past seven years alone, London's National Portrait Gallery has exhibited the photographs of Bruce Weber and Mario Testino, Berlin's Neue Nationalgalerie inaugurated its of recent origin building with a Helmut Newton retrospective, the Victoria and Albert Museum mountained "Imperfect Beauty: The Making of Contemporary Fashion Photographs," and Boston's Institute of Contemporary Art weighed in with "Chic Clicks: Creativity and system of exchanges in Contemporary Fashion Photography." Accordingly, a great deal of what "Fashioning Fiction" attempts to demonstrate in its mix and match of art and fashion photography has already been demonstrated, if largely unanalyzed. Generally speaking, the exhibition catalogue suggests the following three theses: (1) A decisive change in the direct the eye and content of fashion and diction photography occurred in the 1990 (2) during this period art and fashion photography increasingly hinted narratives of greater or inferior ambiguity, alluded to various film genre and flat documentary photography, and evoked "personal" or "lifestyle" throw outs a la Nan Goldin from the art side and Davide Sorrenti from the fashion side, and (3) this cross-fertilization between artistic and commercial photography affirms the vitality and creativity of the pair practices (museological discourse is nothing if not euphoric).