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DOI: 10.1177/1464884904044205
2004 5: 458
Journalism
John Hartley and Ellie Rennie
'About a Girl': Fashion photography as photojournalism
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What is This?
- Oct 19, 2004
Version of Record
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’About a Girl’
Fashion photography as photojournalism
j John Hartley and Ellie RennieQueensland University of Technology
A B S T R A C T
Corinne’s friend Rose is sprawled on an old couch in Corinne’s flat in London. Surrounding Rose on the beer-stained carpet are a few mugs, an ashtray and a telephone cord. The photo is a record of Corinne Day’s reality from a time when she was still on the dole and partying hard. Her bleak but intimate photography became famous in the fashion pages of magazines like The Face and Vogue, where her early photographs of an unknown young model called Kate Moss created the visual style known as ‘dirty realism’ or ‘grunge’. As she describes it, ‘There we were struggling to pay the rent, living in a dump, surrounded by glamorous magazines that were so far away from our own level of living . . . Fashion magazines had been selling sex and glamour for far too long. I wanted to instill some reality into a world of fantasy’ (Cotton, 2000).
Concentrating on British photographer Corinne Day’s work, this article explores the interface between photojournalism and fashion. Day’s photographs are documents of contemporary life but destined for fashion pages. Beyond its ostensible purpose, contemporary fashion photography in magazines like Vogue can be seen to continue and extend the purposes of photojournalism in the documentary tradition. Furthermore, the compulsion towards art and aesthetics found in photojournalism since the days of Picture Post indicates that the same boundary has been pushed from the other side too, ever since photojournalism’s ascendance. This article therefore traces convergences among some aesthetic, discursive and institutional oppositions that have long been kept carefully separated: ‘reality’ and ‘fantasy’ worlds; national identity and art; journalism and fashion.
K E Y W O R D S j Corinne Day j documentary j fashion magazines
j photojournalism
Introduction: the democratization of the sublime?
Why do we hear so little about fashion magazines in either critical media studies or professional journalism programs? For the historian and critic they are as interesting as medieval cathedrals, for the student of public affairs they’re as important as national dailies, while for the professional they offer a career
Journalism
Copyright © 2004 SAGE Publications (London, Thousand Oaks, CA and New Delhi) Vol. 5(4): 458–479 DOI: 10.1177/1464884904044205
option for the best new talent. They also illustrate long-term changes in journalism itself and in communication more generally. But it seems that we find it hard even to recognize (to say nothing about accepting) the part played by fashion photography in the contemporary world and in the history of photojournalism.
In this article, we explore the intellectual foundations that have led to that neglect. First, we argue that a disavowal of beauty, stemming from the Reformation, is still manifest in the modern dedication to truth in its written form. Second, we trace this tendency in photojournalism itself and in aca-demic studies of magazine media. Despite its evident commitment to the primacy of the image, we argue that ever since the heyday of the photo-magazines photojournalism has been affected by a disavowal of its own investment in beauty. The result is a systematic undervaluing of fashion photography, as somehow the opposite of truth, a prejudice that is echoed in contemporary cultural studies. Finally, we put to use the term ‘redaction’ (Hartley, 2000), in order to investigate and to reinvest in fashion photo-graphy’s original contribution to the documentation of contemporary life. Our conclusion, then, is that if you seek for contemporary photojournalism in the great tradition, you will find it in the fashion pages.
In particular, we look at a new paradigm of photography that has grabbed the world’s attention since the early 1990s. We argue that its significance to the history of media is comparable to the advances achieved by the pioneering photomagazines of the 1930s. It combines documentary photojournalism with fashion, art and national identity. But because it has happened in fashion and style magazines like Vogue, it has passed almost unnoticed in academic studies, and in the press too, apart from some predictable (‘protestant’) denunciation.
Combining photojournalism and documentary with art and fashion and occasionally pornography, a new hybrid style of photography that grew exclusively out of fashion and style magazines has made visible areas of ordinary life and components of the national imagination that were rarely documented before. This ‘medieval’ function of using the most sumptuous of available media to document and reflect upon dark-side and demotic realities, and circulating the same among whole populations for much less than the cost of production, may be called the democratization of the sublime.
Word versus image (truth versus beauty)
In the Middle Ages, the paintings and statues that adorned Catholic cathedrals across Europe were understood as ‘laymen’s books and schoolmasters’
(Homilies, 1574), teaching the faithful the stories and ideologies associated with their belief system and exposing ordinary people to daily contact with a corpus of visual, aural and spatial beauty that we continue to revere as fine art. The Catholic imaginary loved pain and suffering almost more than hope and charity and, given the integration of church and state, the power and glory were temporal as well as spiritual. It is still striking to notice the extent to which all this was centered on the visualization of the human form, making bodies – beautiful and battered, clothed and unclothed – the bearers of everyday values and meanings as well as the most profound religious experi-ences. The human body came in every form: divinities and devils, anthro-pomorphic creatures and symbolic personalizations, monarchs and popes, saints and sinners. Often decked in the fashion of the age, each corporeal image illustrated some moral or political truth, making it accessible to all sections of society.
The Reformation was supposed to change all that. The iconoclasts pre-vailed (at least in northern Europe). Truth was held to be confined to The Word, as printed in The Book, and accessible directly, by reading and hearing, not indirectly via the dodgy marketing tricks of a powerful institution like the medieval Catholic Church. Indeed, by the 1570s, paintings and statues in English churches were officially denounced and many of them were defaced or destroyed:
They be trimly decked in gold, silver and stone, as well the images of men as of women, like wanton wenches . . . that love paramours; . . . When they [the ‘simple people’] turn about from the preacher to these books and schoolmasters, and painted scriptures, shall they not find them lying books, teaching other manner of lessons, of esteeming of riches, of pride and vanity in apparel, of niceness and wantonness, and peradventure of whoredom? (Homilies, 1850 [1574]: ‘Against Peril of Idolatry’)
A militant suspicion of such media remains, expressed via remarkably similar sentiments. It is especially evident among the secular successors to the literate Protestantism that triumphed across Europe and the New World, i.e. among people who are dedicated to truth in its written form. These include scientists, academics and journalists – the progressive intelligentsia whose expertise was founded increasingly on various specialist forms of print-literacy. The Reformation’s sometimes visceral suspicion of visual beauty, especially the kind associated with the (female) human form, continued among those with a commitment to realism. In the context of journalism and the public sphere, it led to an abiding division between ‘truth media’ (of which the ideal type is still the broadsheet newspaper) and ‘entertainment media’ on screen and page.
But the Reformation was not entirely successful in this militant campaign and the social function performed by visual media in churches in medieval
times continues to be performed by magazines and other entertainment media in the modern era (this is Umberto Eco’s argument; see Eco, 1987). Cinema, TV, games and magazines continue to communicate like a medieval cathedral, via song, story and spectacle, using beautiful bodies and all manner of medieval devices to teach our secular laity the truths, values, morals and ideologies of these days.
In response, influential opinion among the intelligentsia is still literally iconoclastic, still trying to ‘win’ the Reformation, apt to rail against the media of bodily beauty as seductive but sinful, deluding the people with sexy and violent images, serving the needs not of directly communicated truth but of a powerful global institution, run by corrupt potentates for their own aggrand-izement and, thereby, unwittingly rendering Rupert Murdoch as a latter-day version of a Borgia or Medici pope.
Looking at the history of journalism with this tradition in mind, it seems clear that magazines (compared with ‘hard’ news) and fashion photography (compared with photojournalism) have been prejudicially neglected by schol-ars and professionals alike. The Reformation’s skewed vision has justified a set of a priori assumptions about the relative merits of different forms of journal-ism and whether some of them even count as journaljournal-ism. In other words, journalism itself and also journalism education and studies have inherited a Protestant distinction between print and visual forms. Print is thought to favor dispassionate reason, realism, the public sphere, science, progress and, incid-entally, that other great Protestant theme, ‘the rise of capitalism’ (Tawney, 1998 [1926]). Visual images are thought to favor seduction, emotion, fantasy, private life, ideology, manipulation and consumer marketing (for a recent example of the desire to recuperate the word over spectacle, see Sontag [2002]).
Without fighting the Reformation all over again, it is important to challenge the intellectual legacy that still seems to organize contemporary thought about the status of truth and beauty in public media. In particular, in the context of the practice and study of photojournalism, we argue against the habit of assigning photojournalism to the province of news and fashion photography to that of commercial consumption. Fashion and photojournal-ism should not be understood as distinct or opposing forms. Equally we want to blur the habitual boundaries that are drawn between ‘truth’ (science and journalism) and ‘beauty’ (art and entertainment); and between public (govern-mental and masculine) and private (commercial and female) domains. We argue that fashion magazines unite the two sides with increasing confidence.
Since the decline of the mass circulation weekly photomagazines (includ-ing Life, Picture Post, Vu, Berliner Illustrierte Zeitung), fashion magazines have taken over the role of documenting contemporary life in pictures. Mainstream
magazines like Vogue are a primary location for thinking through some abiding issues of public interest that clearly belong to the same world as that covered by political journalism – for instance (though this is not the only example) the question of national identity. The status of the nation is increasingly uncertain in these days of globalization and super-national phenomena from the Euro-pean Union to the Big Mac, from supermodels to the ‘coalition of the willing’. Fashion magazines have made a distinctive contribution to the public articula-tion of these uncertainties and their consequences as they apply to individual identity and experience.
‘True photojournalism’
For two decades (1938–57) Picture Post presented British people with images of the things ‘they talked and argued about among themselves’ (Hopkinson, 1984 [1970]: 8; see also Hall, 1972; Kee, 1989). The weekly news-magazine’s success was due to the innovative editing of Stefan Lorant, a Hungarian ´emigr´e from Nazi Germany who had pioneered picture magazines in Germany since the 1920s. Picture Post’s photographers – Bill Brandt, Tim Gidal, Bert Hardy, Kurt Hutton, Felix Man, Grace Robertson – are recognized as some of the great pioneers of photojournalism (Marien, 2002).
The magazine’s big pages were formatted to display the full frame of 35 mm photographs. Under Lorant and especially his successor Tom Hopkin-son, who edited Picture Post from 1940 to 1950, those pages promoted a new visual literacy through which ordinary readers might understand their own nation. It was a country that belonged to its people, not to elites. The magazine was dedicated to covering hardship and ordinary life as much as political events and celebrities and it was distinctive for its cheerful conflation of anti-fascism and democratic reformism with a penchant for pretty girls – a ‘populist’ mode of address that it shared with The Daily Mirror at the time and bequeathed to The Sun later on (see Hall, 1972; Hartley, 1999: 116–9). Picture
Post wanted to enter and document the lives of those who read it and as the
most popular photomagazine of the day that meant just about everyone. The pictures remain compelling today, conveying ideas about self and society, long after the newsworthiness of the events themselves has decayed.
Throughout its history, photography has remained divided between aes-thetics and realism. Within journalism, photography’s first allegiance was to the recording of actually existing reality, not least because of the forensic, legalistic quality photos attained by bringing to the page visual evidence of real moments in time (Hartley, 1996: 202–6). Photographers and comment-ators delineated ethical guidelines and creative limits, privileging the ‘natural’
moment over other production processes such as style and creative planning, at least where news events were concerned. Industrially and intellectually, photojournalism was committed to truth and reality while fashion was arti-fice. Techniques used in fashion photography would render a photojournalist into a faker. You had to take pictures of newsworthy moments as they occurred in the world, not set them up as you might in the studio.
However, even this clear and necessary border was blurred. It was an ideological guide to behavior, not an unwavering practice. One of Picture Post’s most celebrated photographers, Tim Gidal, wrote in his own history of photojournalism that ‘sensationalism and indiscretion have no place in true photojournalism’ (Gidal, 1973: 5). He believed that ‘[T]he good photo-reporter is also a good documentary director. He never poses something which has not happened just for the sake of photographic impact. But it is quite valid to repeat a scene which actually took place’ (Gidal, 1973: 17). It was OK to ‘repeat’ in the name of ‘true photojournalism’, even though it was improper to ‘pose’ in the name of art.
Fashion photography was present within Picture Post but it didn’t figure in discussions about the merits and objectives of photojournalism. Perhaps this was because the editors were men of their times and saw fashion either as a women’s issue or as a pretext for a picture of a pretty girl. Picture Post’s first (and last) cover was famously a picture of two pretty girls (Hopkinson, 1984/1970). Hopkinson appointed Anne Scott-James as Picture Post’s first women’s editor in 1940 and the magazine carried regular specialist fashion spreads as well as photojournalism with a fashion flavor. For instance, the invention of nylon was a news story from the burgeoning plastics industry in which Britain was a significant player. It had implications for the war effort. While the accompanying story was about parachutes, Picture Post celebrated the superior qualities of nylon by a picture of pretty legs wearing nylon stockings (Picture Post, 1940: 23–4).
Two of the fair
Kurt Hubschmann was born in Strasbourg in 1893, moved to England in 1934 and became Kurt Hutton, one of Picture Post’s leading photographers. He introduced a 1947 collection of his own works, Speaking Likeness, with these words:
Why do I photograph the way I do? Because it is the only way to achieve what appeals to me most in photography. Narrowing the field down to portrait,
advertising and journalistic photography: I abhor the unnatural, artificial pic-ture. (Hutton, 1947: 9)
Hutton was particularly skilled at creating portraits, paying attention to expression and the subject’s surroundings. But he admits that he was not always fortunate enough to be in the right place at the right time, as was the case for one famous photograph he took of two young women on a Merry-go-Round (see Figure 1). In Speaking Likeness, Hutton explains that his first attempt to shoot the Southend fair had failed – the editor wanted one striking picture and not a documentary series. He was told to try again and so, to get it right, on the second attempt he took a pretty model with him:
This time the editor said the photos were all right but the girl was modellish – not really full of life, joy and laughter. ‘Well’, said the editor, ‘get something on the caterpillar. You know the sort of thing. It’s quite easy’. I felt like asking ‘Is it?’ I could not risk waiting til the weekend and depending on the public so I set off for Southend with a young actress. The photographs were very nice. ‘This is it,’ said the editor. ‘Only this time I’d much rather have two girls. And this girl is fine, but she looks more like an Oxford undergraduate than the Southend type.’ By this time I was beginning to feel slightly irritable . . . (p. 72)
Hutton put his mind to it again and found two ‘Southend-type’ girls through a film agency (given the location, these would be known today as
‘Essex girls’). After waiting for a rain storm to pass, he finally got his picture: ‘An easy picture such as you might pick up with a bit of luck on any fine day’ (p. 72). Picture Post’s own caption reads ‘A picture of happiness – the Girl on the Merry-go-Round’ (8 October 1938). It was a picture by a photojournalist that documented the joy of ordinary life, sure enough. But it was as artificial as any fashion photo.
Hutton captioned the picture differently in his book: he called it ‘Two at the Fair’. He matched it with another portrait that he captioned ‘One of the Fair’. This photo is not nearly as well known as the one captured for Picture Post after so much ado, but it may well have inspired it. It shows a young girl, this time on her own, sitting casually, her dress failing to cover her legs (like the Southend actress), on the steps of a carousel ride, possibly also at Southend. She appears to be whistling. Intrigued by her ‘complete aloofness from her surroundings’, Hutton took some shots before she disappeared into the crowd (p. 72). It seems he didn’t make himself known to the girl or discover her identity. Today, the uninterested expression and unself-conscious slouch of the circus child, ‘bored by the daily round’ (p. 72), might have made it into the pages of a fashion magazine ahead of the over-produced laughing actress (see Figure 1).
Hutton labeled this anonymous girl as ‘One of the Fair’, i.e. belonging to the ‘fair sex’ and, thus, to the same regime of desire as his leggy Southend-type actresses. But, of course, desire is exactly what photojournalism most firmly disavows, leaving such matters to fashion photography, where the eroticiza-tion of youthful nonchalance has become a familiar theme (Hartley, 1998; Hartley and Lumby, 2003: 59–61). Indeed, it may be the case here that the evident eroticization of a female form that is also clearly that of a child is only possible because the image is presented as documentary photojournalism ‘picked up with a bit of luck’ one fine day. Disavowal is built in.
These two photographs from the classic era of photojournalism com-pletely erase any distinctions between documentary and fashion photography. Both of them use the female form to show off aspects of Englishness, ordinary life and desirability. Both are taken by the same photojournalist. ‘One of the Fair’ used the techniques of ‘true photojournalism’, recording a moment that occurred independently of its observation but it was only captured at all because it concurred with the artistic vision of the photographer. In contrast, ‘Two at the Fair’ was published in a news-magazine but used all the artificial techniques associated with fashion and advertising. And, looked at again after the passage of years, it is the stolen image of the anonymous girl – the journalistic appropriation of the real – that perhaps speaks most clearly to a contemporary fashion aesthetic.
Theory goes critical
Fashion journalism has routinely been treated as unworthy even in the pages of newspapers that use it, despite attempts by many within the industry to raise issues of newsroom culture and the status of lifestyle media. An early volume on journalism practice, The Kemsley Manual of Journalism (Kemsley, 1950), devoted a section to ‘Journalism for Women’ in which a woman reporter and a fashion editor discuss their ‘strenuous and satisfying’ work schedules, de-glamorizing their industry in an attempt to be taken seriously. Nonetheless, the picture (see Figure 2) that accompanies their article shows a group of behatted women relaxed and gossiping, taking tea at ‘their own club’ (The Women’s Press Club) (Kemsley, 1950: 320). By comparison, the male reporter illustrated in the same book is the epitome of urban modernity: he has rushed to the phone booth somewhere in the darkness of the city so that ‘the man on the other end will get his words down with strict accuracy and astonishing speed’ (p. 17) (see Figure 2).
Lifestyle journalism continues to be treated with derision by many in the news industry, even as lifestyle sections of newspapers and ‘non-news’ formats of journalism have become more popular and lucrative. It has suffered similar neglect in academic studies. Janice Winship (1987) wrote that women’s maga-zines are to journalism what TV soaps are to news and current affairs – they are maligned and misunderstood. However, this critical insight, which sought to
Figure 2 ‘The Reporter’ versus ‘Women Journalists’ (The Kemsley Manual of Journalism,
recuperate magazines aimed at women as part of a feminist contribution to cultural studies, did not carry through into theories of fashion photography. For instance, Angela McRobbie’s pioneering study of teen magazine Jackie recognized how it might teach assertiveness and build confidence in young women (McRobbie, 1991). But in her more recent work on the fashion industry, she takes fashion magazines to task. Their written text is ‘culturally reassuring’ while the visual images are designed to shock. Fashion’s devotion to mood and statement stifles critique, discussion and exploration in maga-zine journalism. As a result, she concludes, ‘of all forms of the consumer culture, fashion seems to be the least open to self-scrutiny and political debate’ (McRobbie, 1998: 153).
McRobbie thinks that magazines are primarily ‘to-be-looked-at’ (p. 153) and, therefore, exist on the surface of cultural engagement. This position is an extension of an argument put by Dick Hebdige in his book Hiding in the Light (1988; see also Jobling, 1999). For Hebidge, The Face magazine is hyper-conformist. You don’t read it, you cruise it or wander through it – as in a dream. It goes out of its way to ‘flatten out the world’ (p. 161), turning everything to surface. The possibilities of postmodern juxtaposition are end-less, ‘blurring the lines’ between ‘street fashion/advertising/haute couture; journalism/science fiction/critical theory; advertising/critical theory/haute couture’ (p. 161), says Hebdige. The only conclusion he can draw is that this displays the problem of the postmodern: Where everything has meaning, nothing does.
Hebdige does respect picture magazines, however. He writes that Picture
Post, along with the films of Humphrey Jennings, was the most progressive
and mature articulation of what ‘the popular’ meant at that time. But he finds it difficult to accept that The Face was the Picture Post of the end of the 20th century. He writes that the terms that defined Picture Post are no longer effective: ‘fair play, decency, egalitarianism and natural justice’. Everything is ‘cut-up’ so that the terms ‘waver and collapse’ (p. 161).
The dissatisfaction expressed by McRobbie, Hebdige and others reveals their own expectations and systems of critique. They look for written realism, discussion and ideas in the text of these publications and lament the prece-dence of image and aesthetics over the printed word. In his book Televisuality (1995), John Caldwell points out that aesthetic visual culture has been dis-missed as the result of an intellectual tradition – both religious and rationalist – that privileges the word over the image. Style and image are thus under-theorized and treated as ‘irrational, unreal, and without redeeming logic or history’ (p. 338). Caldwell’s observation is as true for fashion photography as it is for television: there is a presumption that issues of contemporary life
cannot be adequately dealt with through a medium that utilizes attitude, style and beauty to convey its meaning.
A new visual culture?
Hebdige published his analysis of The Face just before its picture editor, Phil Blicker, launched a new talent on its cover in July 1990 – the photography of Corinne Day, working with stylist Melanie Ward, using a new young model called Kate Moss. It was a breakthrough in the world of photomagazines comparable to the one achieved by Picture Post in the 1930s and 1940s. Often remembered as the ‘grunge’ period, controversial in itself, this new break-through was to transform fashion as well as fashion photography. The Observer newspaper summed up Day’s contribution:
Today, evidence of her influence on fashion photography is everywhere. Without Day, there would be none of the stripped-down glamour or unscrubbed beauty she pioneered with Moss and, more controversially, none of the ‘dirty realism’ – as her dingy, almost anti-fashion images were dubbed at the time. (O’Connell, 2001)
The simple provocation of this new photography was to take the world of the consumer – as represented/interpreted by a new kind of photographer and stylist – and make that world more important than fashion, even anti-fashion. Once again photography became ‘the guiding light’ of a new visual culture. It took a stance, appealed to the everyday and displayed ‘a strong cultural and social force’ (Beaupr´e et al., 2002: 7).
Charlotte Cotton, a curator at the Victoria & Albert Museum in London, noted the significance of the shift from fashion to consumer:
Freelance stylists of the nineties who were not formally affiliated to a magazine had no particular responsibility towards showing the merchandise of fashion designers in a commercial light. Their motivation was to imbue their representa-tion of fashion with a new and exciting norepresenta-tion of imaginative consumers who
incorporated fashion into their own lives. (Cotton, 2000: 6, our emphasis)
Cotton’s book, Imperfect Beauty, distinguished this moment of image-making from other periods by pointing to the greater degree to which it made cultural and social themes the conscious subjects of its narratives (see also the journal
Fashion Theory on the Imperfect Beauty exhibition [Tulloch, 2002]). The
image-makers constructed scenes ‘that spoke of the aspirations and realities of contemporary youth culture’ (p. 6). They were documenting their own lives and creating an aesthetic that would allow them to engage with commercial culture. This was not an appeal to authenticity in fashion photography but an acknowledgement that fashion photography could achieve what documentary was generally believed to do.
Nick Knight, another rising photographer of that time who also took on the job of picture editor for i-D during this intense period of reform in style and fashion photography, says of his own work: ‘It was a real investigation, partly of the surroundings and how, when you’re in a city, there are different rhythms that the city works to. I was trying to deal with these different levels of experience and put it in a fashion story’ (Cotton, 2000: 15). As Cotton (2000: 6) writes, many of these photos were staged in the flats where the image-makers lived, which was ‘the antithesis of the glamorous and exotic locations that had been the mainstay of fashion photography in the eighties. They resonated with the personal histories of the image-makers, emphasizing the unfolding of personal meaning in fashion photography.’
A generation earlier, Nancy Hall-Duncan had written that fashion photo-graphy is to its critics ‘a subject of ephemeral ends and misplaced values’ (Hall-Duncan, 1979: 9). For some critics, ‘dirty realism’ promoted unhealthy values and betokened a culture that has gone astray (Arnold, 1999). The labels ‘waif model’ and ‘heroin chic’ came to describe the style to which Corinne Day was so central. They captured the tensions among portraiture, documentary and advertisement – or art, politics and consumption. One of the most persistent of these concerns was that the trend towards younger, thinner models would encourage eating disorders. This accusation followed Kate Moss around for over a decade, largely on the basis of photographs taken by Day herself for The Face and Vogue. Others, especially in the USA, saw grunge or anti-fashion photographs as promoting a drug culture and addiction. Even-tually, in May 1997, President Clinton himself deplored the fashion industry for promoting ‘heroin chic’ after the overdose death of 20-year old photogra-pher Davide Sorrenti (brother of Mario, who had photographed his then girlfriend Kate Moss for the Calvin Klein campaign that made her famous in the USA). Davide’s photos of his girlfriend, model James [Jaime] King, were an American equivalent of what Corinne Day had done in London (Peterson, 1997; Wren, 1997; see also http://www.lumiere.com/fashion/97/10/dead-cool/ index1.html).
Under-exposure?
The attempt to speak truth through beauty in the fashion photograph has remained problematic for critics who viewed it as making inaccurate and insufficient reference to a ‘critical’ (word-based) idea of reality. Corinne Day believed her photos were about reality. She said that the point of photography was to show things that we don’t normally see:
getting as close as you can to real life. What I found interesting was to capture people’s most intimate moments. And sometimes intimacy is sad. In photos, we’re usually laughing and happy and having a good time. We don’t normally see the other side, when we’re not having such a good time. (Day in Garratt, 2000)
In Day’s fashion pictures, the themes of her own documentary work were borrowed and transformed into something beautiful. The everyday elements derived from contemporary London life became an aesthetic of sometimes grotty (as well as gritty) reality. There may seem little potential for such simple techniques to offend but her pictures resulted in an international furor, especially Day’s set of Kate Moss called ‘Under-exposure,’ photographed at Moss’s own flat (Vogue, June 1993). Critics from The Daily Mail to Marion Hume asserted that the images glamorized starvation and invited the spectator to stare at a sexualized child who ‘looks back at the camera with the passivity of a victim’ (Hume in Jobling, 1999: 172–3; see also Hartley, 1996: 17–21).
Vogue’s editor Alexandra Shulman defended the pictures: ‘Personally, I think
they’re beautiful. The kiddie-porn accusation is ridiculous’ (quoted in Lynn, 1993: 447). Kate Moss was 19 at the time but feelings ran high, and some blamed Moss herself. Lesley White, writing in Vogue the following year, summarized the case for the prosecution:
In the minds of the tub-thumping leader-writers, The Sun’s slimming editor and American feminist academe, she is a sinister influence, a Lolita nymphet, a paedophile fantasy, the scourge of modern womanhood promoting anorexia, self-loathing and the sexualisation of children. (Vogue, August 1994)
Truth in beauty
Corinne Day started her career in photography by taking pictures of her friends (Mikhail, 2002). Her earlier works for The Face feature the people with whom she was spending most of her time – many were out-of-work models – in their familiar spaces. This ongoing interest in documentary photography is shown in her book Diary (2000). Domestic, but sometimes distressing, the photos are of a group of young people going about their lives – they sit around in groups, take drugs, have sex, get upset, nurse children and undergo medical treatment.
Motifs from the documentary shots appeared within Day’s fashion pic-tures. One Diary photograph entitled ‘Tara’s Bedroom 1997’ showed a dim room lit only by a string of fairy lights hung over a mirror. Her fashion shoots for Vogue regularly featured similar lights in the background. In one of the ‘Under-exposure’ pictures, fairy lights framed a pensive Kate Moss, arms crossed, photographed against the wall of her flat (Vogue, June 1993). In
another set, one model relaxes on a garden chair behind which the colored lights are strung, while another sits at a makeshift turntable illuminated by fairy lights somewhere out in the country – at a rave party, perhaps (‘The morning after the year before’, Vogue, January 2002).
Another favorite is the sofa or couch. There’s a self-portrait of Corinne Day lying on the one in her own home in Brewer Street (Day, 2000). It was repeated for The Face (August 1993), this time featuring Corinne Day’s friend Rose (Rosemary Ferguson) as the model but using the same couch, surrounded by ashtrays, dirty cups and carpet stains (see Figure 3). Later, Kate Moss appeared clad in gold designerwear for Vogue’s prestige millennium shoot (‘24-Carat Kate’, December 2000), in an almost identical pose – her feet turned in for a recognizably grunge-like posture. Another couch – grottier than ever, this time sporting three intertwined models – turns up in a Day set for i-D (‘May the circle remain unbroken’, i-D, June/July 2002).
Here was a visual language and history at work – an archive of images that combined documentary and fashion to present a mood of the times. The cross-referencing and self-cross-referencing itself was not unusual. Fashion/art photo-grapher Elaine Constantine says that she went through ‘hundreds of books and magazines like Life for ideas. It’s not a matter of repeating an existing image; it’s more about pulling together a series of messages to communicate a mood or give life to the character that originally inspired me’ (Cotton, 2000: 152). Her famous photograph of three models speeding down a hill on bicycles could, for instance, be a reference to photojournalist Romano Cagno-ni’s documentary photo, ‘High spirits on the road to Pietrasanta’ (1985, republished in Binchy, 2002), or Herman Landshoff’s pioneering picture of three female cyclists from Junior Bazaar (1940, republished in Hall-Duncan, 1979), the first fashion photograph to show speed distortion – or both. Kurt Hutton did the same self-referential thing. In 1945, Picture Post published a photograph entitled ‘Back to Southend Fair’. It was a picture of two women on
Figure 3 Corinne Day: ‘Me at home Brewer Street 1992’ (Diary, 2000); ‘Rose in my flat’
a Merry-go-Round on a windy day, seven years after Hutton’s original shot made it to print.
Redaction
We suggest that in order to understand fashion photography, academic re-search needs to remove the distorting lens of ‘critical’ intellectual inquiry that discounts visual style as superficial and without its own logic. In fact, fashion photography, with its hybrid convergence of commerce, art, documentary and desire, is an intense example of more general developments in communica-tion. Studying it can assist us to understand how a culture that is drifting beyond militant (protestant) modernism makes sense for and of itself. Among the features of such cultures is a new emphasis on the world of the consumer, as opposed to that of the producer (author):
From: To:
producer consumer
public sphere private life nation state self/DIY citizen
In relation to the creative forms associated with such cultures, it is clear that the media of modernity have begun to develop into new forms:
From: To:
realism (journalism, novel) ‘reality’ formats
read only media (broadcast) read and write media (interactive) criticism (political, literary) redaction (creative editing)
Like other art forms, fashion photography combines original imagination with the plunder of ‘found objects’ (including fairy lights and couches); it gathers and repurposes ideas, images and allusions in a process that has been dubbed ‘redaction’ (see Hartley, 2000). Redaction, ‘creative editing’, is itself an off-shoot of journalism and publishing: it is the rearrangement, revision and adaptation of existing materials (texts, stories, images, ideas) to produce new forms and meanings. It has begun to supplant ‘critical’ writing, both literary and political. The ‘cutting up’ of existing ideas, moments and images, symp-toms in the body politic diagnosed as ultimately meaningless by Hebdige, may appear morbid when judged by the paradigm of protestant realism. But modernist realism itself has wavered under the scrutiny of a public that is itself now skilled at ‘writing’ as well as ‘reading’ the media, deriving and producing meaning from a range of sources – as what Charlotte Cotton called ‘imagin-ative consumers’. Redaction allows us to see its producers (both professional
and amateur) as theorists of contemporary life who create insights into consumer culture rather than displaying symptoms of its failure.
The hybridization of documentary and fashion, the ability of creative workers to re-purpose images and ideas in a way that makes us see things anew, and a willingness to capture attitude as well as facts, all suggest a new form of journalism. Redaction occurs not only in fashion photography but across the board in journalism and among its readers. The ideological barriers that have separated news journalism from lifestyle, fashion and entertainment forms no longer hold true. An informed attention to the way they are dissolving and reforming in media like fashion photography can assist us to understand and even to predict what’s coming next.
One thing’s certain: photography has to abandon its commitment to an objective or evidential notion of ‘the real’ even as it continues to strive for ‘the truth’. As photographer Nick Knight puts it:
I think photography for the last hundred years or so has had this idea that it brings a truth, and it has that role put upon it. It’s something that’s fallen very much fairly and squarely on the shoulders of photography as a medium. . . . [But] when you fall in love with a photographer’s work you fall in love with his or her vision of life, so I don’t think photography has ever been realist. I think it’s been a very bad tool for presenting real life. (Nick Knight in Cotton, 2000: 17)
’About a Girl’
In 1997, a photograph taken by Corinne Day of Andy Frank, a member of the band Pusherman, appeared in an issue of Penthouse UK magazine (September 1997). Andy appears standing in a field, wearing only a pair of low-riding jeans (styling was by Day’s friend Tara St Hill). In the same issue, Day contributed a nude photostory entitled ‘About a Girl’, featuring model Rosemary Ferguson (Day’s friend Rose; styling by Tara St Hill, ‘assisted by Andy Frank’) (see Figure 4).
Both stories have an intimacy – indeed, a ‘dirty realism’ – not of the usual
Penthouse variety. In fact, the issue in which they appeared was the relaunch
issue of Penthouse as ‘PH.UK’, a short-lived experiment to ‘create a magazine that reflects the way 90’s Britain behaves, thinks and dreams,’ as editor Tom Hilditch put it (Penthouse, September 1997: 6). The picture of Andy was not limited to its photojournalistic publication as a music feature in Penthouse, however. Like Tara and Rose, Andy was a friend of Corinne Day and, as a result, the same picture appears in Diary without the accompanying article – just the title ‘Andy in Wales’. At the time of writing (July, 2003), this picture was also on the website of the contemporary art gallery, Gimpel Fils, where it was for sale for £800 (www.gimpelfils.com). ‘Andy in Wales’ is photojournalism taken
by a fashion photographer for a porno magazine: it is also a personal docu-ment of Day’s world and it is art.
These days Corinne Day sells her work through Gimpel Fils whilst con-tinuing to produce fashion spreads for British Vogue but when she started out the only knowledge she had of photography came from the pictures she had seen in commercial magazines and presumably her experience on the other side of the lens as a model. Like others before her, Corinne Day’s commitment to realism has not discouraged her from working within the fashion magazine format. Deborah Turbeville, a fashion photographer known for her work in American Vogue in the 1970s, expressed her rejection of the categories that describe a photographer’s field of work: ‘I am not a fashion photographer, I am not a photojournalist, I am not a portraitist’ (Turbeville in Brooks, 1992: 20; see also Craik, 1994). Day expresses a similar sentiment: ‘I wouldn’t say that documentary photography is more creative than fashion photography, it’s just that documentary photography is more important for me because it’s some-thing I’ve lived’ (Day in Mikhail, 2002). Stylist Anna Cockburn also downplays the difference between art and fashion: ‘The pictures were out of the context of fashion; they were portraits, in many ways. What made them fashion was the fact that I was choosing what she wore, the clothes were for sale and the images ended up in the magazine’ (Cockburn in Cotton, 2000: 64).
This is not to say that fashion photography is without its constraints or that there is no difference between Diary and Corinne Day’s fashion work. For Day, the shift from personal to public register was far from smooth. Images of Kate Moss as ‘heroin chic’ kept Day out of favor with Vogue for some time, by her own account:
In 1993, Melanie [Ward] and I went our separate ways. She thought I took my work too personally. She was right, I did. Mel moved to America and never spoke to me again. My friendship with Kate also ended around the same time. I had
Figure 4 Corinne Day: ‘About a Girl’ and ‘Andy in Wales’ (Penthouse UK, September
taken some photographs of Kate for Vogue[.] [T]hese photographs upset her model agency and a whole bunch of people in the press in England and America. Kate never worked with me after this. I thought the photographs were funny at the time, they certainly weren’t the kind of photographs normally seen in Vogue. I’d photographed Kate in her flat. I bought some underwear from Ann Summers’ sex shop in Brewer Street, which is where I live. I also bought some American tan tights and got Liza Bruce to copy some T-shirts of mine so at least there were some designer credits in the magazine. The photographs looked very cheap and tacky – everything that Vogue wasn’t supposed to be . . . Vogue never worked with me again. (Day in Cotton, 2000: 85)
In fact, Vogue did work with Corinne Day again – many times – and so did Kate Moss. When they were reunited seven years later:
it was like we had only seen each other yesterday. She sat down in her glamorous underwear, said, ‘Oh, I’m starving,’ and started eating a sandwich. I just took a shot of her in her lunch hour and they published it. You can see in the pictures that there is a friendship. (Day in O’Connell, 2001)
Thus, despite the obvious constraints (and Day’s disingenuousness about why a picture by her of Kate Moss eating a sandwich might be regarded as a publishable joke by Vogue as well as the participants), photographers like Day who see themselves as documentary photographers are still interested in publishing their work as fashion photography within the pages of these magazines.
National identity: ‘with reservations’
One example of how fashion magazines engage with issues of public import is the far from straightforward issue of a country’s own identity. National identity in Vogue is bound up with ideas of creativity and talent. As the June 1998 ‘Best of British’ special issue of Vogue put it:
British style is now perceived to be one of the cultural signposts of the Nineties. And not only in fashion, but also in film, art, music and even food. It has a courage to it, a raw vigour, in an increasingly homogenous international market. But what’s most seductive about it is its breadth, the excesses of anarchy and conservatism. What’s also baffling is that it resists all generalizations. (Brampton, 1998: 129)
Vogue was thinking about both ‘Brit’ and ‘art’ long before the New Labour
neologism of Britart came into existence (see Goodrum, 2001), although it was quite happy to devote an issue to ‘Fashion meets Art’ (starring Kate Moss) on the occasion of the opening of the Tate Modern (Vogue, May 2000). Its preoccupation was partly a question of style – what is ‘British’ style? But the contemplation didn’t stop there. Vogue has been perennially interested in what
constituted Britishness at all, not just in matters of fashion and fame. For instance, the March 1968 issue was dedicated to various takes on Britishness, including fashion photography by hot new talent David Bailey, features on British actors, artists and aristocrats, promotions for British fabrics (ICI’s Crimplene), and several major articles on ‘How British is British?’ – one by celebrated Picture Post journalist James Cameron:
I don’t especially back Britain, frankly; I am British, so what else am I supposed to do? I don’t believe in the people as a people. Since I am British, however, I would as soon see us winning as losing, rather up than down. I do not believe in any single one of the terms of reference by which this miracle is supposedly to be achieved, but, being British, I am on my side. With reservations. (Cameron, 1968: 114)
Cameron’s reservations included regret that Britain had failed the latest test of history:
In that summer of 1947 [i.e. the time of Indian independence] we had in our grasp the leadership of 2,200 million people all over Asia and Africa who wished to be neither Communist nor Imperialist, and who yearned for the moral captaincy of a Power that renounced power. . . . For a moment the greatest Third Force was possible, and it could have been us.
But, of course, we chucked it away, as we have chucked so many things away. . . . We settled for a Western dependency that looked dodgy then and looks tragic now. (Cameron, 1968: 114)
Great or grot?
National identity; a mixed blessing at best; a redactional achievement in
Vogue. Flick the page; a Mary Quant coat: ‘Great British Coats in Great British
Fabrics’ (Vogue, 15 March 1968: 116). Was national identity found in ancestry or innovation, politics or style? Claiming that Britain was fashionable was simply to aspire to a Britain that was not stuck in the past, one that was capable of innovation and renovation. Of course, government and business hoped for that too. From the other end of the promotional spectrum, the image-makers of the 1990s moment that we have been discussing also found a way to negotiate ideas of national identity. They expressed their own interest in what Britishness meant:
Craig McDean: It did feel as if this great thing was happening in London, especially when the whole grunge period arrived. It made people from Paris and America look at England in a different way. (Cotton, 2000: 32)
Melanie Ward: I published my first story, a Nigel Shafran story in The Face. It was shot near where Nigel lived. We wanted it to look suburban and very home-made, with a kind of English sense of humour. (Cotton, 2000: 76)
Vogue has constantly returned to worry and tug at this theme; for instance,
the January 2002 issue on ‘Fashion’s Force’ featured 18 British models on the cover photographed by Peruvian-born Mario Testino (who enjoined them to ‘Look Breeteesh!’, p. 100) and a set by Corinne Day featuring grotty English icons from punk records and torn union flags to dumped Cortinas, as well as the usual fairy lights (‘The morning after the year before’, Vogue, January 2002).
This era presented a view of Britishness that was different from what had been seen before. In many ways it represented a shift towards seeing beauty and Britishness in the ordinary conditions of people, grotty as well as great. It was personalities and intimacy that mattered, not some claim to a perfect life or powerful nation. Fashion journalism was a way for creative people to take on national identity. It was claimed by fashion magazines as their legitimate territory.
Conclusion
Contemporary fashion photography constitutes both a secularization of the sublime (beauty) and a new form of ‘laymen’s books and schoolmasters’ (truth). It documents contemporary life and teaches some important truths, largely via visualizations of the human body in often quite testing situations. The fashion magazines disseminate all this at a price that makes them the cheapest and most accessible source of high aesthetic imagery available today. They address a feminized (but not entirely female) public who know that the modernist separation between public and private life, politics and consump-tion, documentary photojournalism and fashion photography, is so over.
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Biographical notes
John Hartley is Professor and Dean of the Creative Industries Faculty, Queensland
University of Technology, and former Head of the School of Journalism, Media and Cultural Studies at Cardiff University. He is the author of many books and articles in journalism, media and cultural studies, including A Short History of Cultural Studies (Sage, 2003), The Indigenous Public Sphere (with Alan McKee, Oxford, 2000), Uses
of Television (Routledge, 1999), Popular Reality: Journalism, Modernity, Popular Culture (Arnold, 1996). He is Editor of the International Journal of Cultural Studies. Address: Queensland University of Technology, Creative Industries Precinct, Kelvin
Grove, Brisbane 4059, Australia. [email: [email protected]]
Ellie Rennie is a postdoctoral Fellow at the Creative Industries Research and
Applications Centre, Queensland University of Technology. Her work has been published in the Australian Journal of Communications, Media International Australia and Javnost (The Public). She is co-Vice Chair of the Community Communications section of the IAMCR.
Address: Queensland University of Technology, Creative Industries Precinct, Kelvin
