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The Counterfeit Body: Fashion Photography and the Deceptions
of Femininity, Sexuality, Authenticity and Self in the 1950s, 60s and 70s [Page 7]
Finkelstein supports this viewpoint decades later in her examination of fashion’s far-reaching influence. “In studies of the fashion photograph, [scholars] have [noted] that this kind of photography, which was once a disparaged practice, is now responsible for those images which order and aestheticize the everyday” (17). The mass circulated, technologically reproduced image seems to have unlimited reach in the present era. Specifically, innovations in photographic, cinematic and computer imaging continue to question the correspondence between what is seen and what is accepted as normal. Through sheer saturation of public space, fashion images overdetermine and normalize what was once dismissed as too obscene, too trivial or too extreme in any other sense for the popular sphere. As viewers encounter advertisements, the experience and meaning derived from them is punctuated by the viewers’ detached and somewhat passive voyeurism. Another way fashion photography can be understood and examined within the context of the Frankfurt School theorists is in Adorno’s collaborative work with Max Horkheimer, “The Culture Industry: Enlightenment as Mass Deception.” In this well-known piece, issues of social propriety and the submission of creativity to the homogenizing whims of the culture industry are confronted and deconstructed. The authors assert that no form in the cultural mainstream has fully preserved its original and possibly alternative or subversive qualities and roots. In being represented by the culture industry, every form is inevitably and inescapably filtered and altered to be made more appropriate for popular culture. This uniformity ensures and functions as a form of social control, censoring any possible deviant ideas from infiltrating and stirring up the masses. Where fashion relates to this system is the fact of its inclusion within the culture industry. Fashion photographs ultimately become part of the public domain, and in this process, even the most scandalous or inventive images are toned down or censored by the institution. No truly creative and innovative work survives this process of social streamlining and sanitizing with integrity intact. It is this reality that can be credited in part to fashion photography’s repetitious and derivative character. Consuming the images, and subsequently their messages, the viewer is participating in the culture industry and perpetuating the cycle of homogenization. Of course, those viewers who are prompted to buy whatever is being sold are more actively and directly feeding the apparatus, but by even consuming the images alone, a purpose is being served that benefits the institution. More actively involved in this process is the figure of the fashion photographer, who creates and presents the ‘star,’ introducing this new ‘product’ into the commercial and public spheres. The more a person becomes a persona, more object than subject, the more the audience feels a sense of removal from that individual. Even though the consumer may gaze at and take in the image of the star almost anywhere, this act is one of alienating and isolating distance. Benjamin comments on the distancing effect between the viewer and the image in his essay, “The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction,” as referenced by Reka C. V. Buckley and Stephen Gundle in the essay “Flash Trash: Gianni Versace and the Theory and Practice of Glamour. By analyzing consumption and art in the industrial era, he notes the repercussions and implications mediated or determined by mass production of objects, specifically art objects, and the likely destruction of ‘aura’ with widespread dispersal and distribution (334). As the star loses his or her human qualities with increased representation as an image, this separation is presented as a negative outcome. In the case of language and images however, Benjamin asserts that this division is an act of liberation. Brookes borrows his ideas and asserts, “The emancipation of the image from its caption, and of the product-image from the product, means that the advertising image has become the pure imperative, not divisible into form and content, the pure veneer, the absolute façade for and of itself” (22). As the image is divorced from its original context, meanings shift and transform, and visual communication is privileged over verbal. And yet, the ultimate consumer of such images ends up losing, because they learn to accept the reproduction (the substitute) and dismiss the uniqueness of every reality, most significantly, even when that ‘reality’ is a person (Buckley and Gundle 334). When the image increases in visibility, it becomes seemingly more accessible and desirable. With this simultaneous pervasiveness and illusion of proximity and attainability and distance and unavailability, the consumer seeks some kind of tangible manifestation of the ‘object.’ Buckley and Gundle cite Benjamin, who writes, Every day the urge grows stronger to get a hold of an object at a very close range by way of its likeness, its reproduction. Unmistakably, reproduction as offered by picture magazines and newsreels differs from the image seen by the unarmed eye. Uniqueness and permanence are as closely linked in the latter as are transitoriness and reproducibility in the former. (334) Mass reproduced images of desired objects offer a quick fix, but no finite solution for the want. Fashion photography and advertising assembles and proffers an idealized illusion. No reality can match the crafted image. And when the illusion comes to substitute the actuality, public perception and expectations are irrevocably altered through this fragmentation and replacement.
Semiotics, the system of signs asserting meaning by way of language and image, proves to be enormously relevant and valuable when looking at fashion photography as a means of communication. Fashion photography speaks both the reality and illusion of garments and of bodies, and in deconstructing how these elements are organized and presented, a new language and system emerges from the photographic work. Roland Barthes places fashion photography within a semiological framework, applying semiotic structure and rationale to the genre as a system of communication for symbols and signs present within any given image. As fashion photography is positioned within this theoretical schema of meanings, Barthes attempts to contextualize photographs with elements of this framework. Ultimately, his actions in reconfiguring and positioning the genre end in failure, at his own admission, however the process of his analysis is revealing and insightful nonetheless.
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