Thursday, 20 August 2009
Black Savage
Monday, 13 July 2009
Africa is in Style
Wednesday, 24 June 2009
A Model Question
Unlike nineteenth century Orientalist painting, in which the western presence is conspicuous by its absence, in fashion photography, the westerner must be present, in the form of the fashion model, to show off the clothes and to act as the channel through which the spectator is transported into the fashion fantasy.
The photographs in this post (featuring the Ethiopian model Liya Kebede in Mali for US Vogue, half-Peruvian Helena Christensen in Peru for US Marie Claire, and the Indian model Lakshmi Menon shot in Goa for US Vogue) raise the issue of whether there is a difference between the messages transmitted by images that contain non-white models, and those that do not. Certainly, using ‘ethnic’ models serves to break down the divide between West and non-West, but is it naïve to argue that the models, and therefore the images are free from an exoticizing, Orientalist gaze because of their ethnicity?
Photo credits
School kids, rickshaws, and dancing natives
1. ‘White Heat’. Photograph by Arthur Elgort. © American Vogue, March 2006
2. ‘Love, Brazil’. Photograph by Michael Roberts. © American Elle, April 2006
3. ‘Ticket to Paradise’. Photograph by Patrick Demarchelier. © American Vogue, December 2004
4. 'China'. Photograph by Arthur Elgort. © American Vogue, 1994
5. ‘Cool Khaki’. Photograph by Kim Knott. © British Vogue, May 1994
6. ‘Hot Shots’. Photograph by Arthur Elgort. © British Vogue, July 1998
7. ‘All The Raj’. Photograph by Arthur Elgort. © American Vogue, June 1999
8. ‘Meet Me In Havana’. Photograph by Patrick Demarchelier. © Harper’s Bazaar, May 1998
9. ‘Cool Khaki’. Photograph by Kim Knott. © British Vogue, May 1994
10. ‘The Shape of Summer’. Photograph by Arthur Elgort. © British Vogue,
June 1994
11. ‘All The Raj’. Photograph by Arthur Elgort. © American Vogue, June 1999
[1] Margo Jefferson, ‘Looking at What Black Looks Like’, New York Times, 11 June 1997.
[2] Kondo, Performing Race, p. 92.
[3] Jefferson, ‘Looking’.
[4] Jobling, Fashion Spreads, p. 2.
[5] Thomas Y. T. Luk, ‘Hong Kong as City/Imaginary in The World of Suzie Wong, Love is a Many Splendored Thing, and Chinese Box’, New Asia Academic Bulletin, Vol. 18, 2004, p. 75.
[6] Ibid., p. 77.
Tuesday, 23 June 2009
More White Mischief
The same old cliches?
British Vogue has just run a story in its May 2009 edition called The Road to Damascus. Photographed by Tom Craig, it features Stella Tennant wearing this season's trend for sequined, shining, gilded and embellished clothing. The clothes are beautiful, the photographs are stunning - shot mostly at dusk and dawn the light shows off the clothes and the city to spectacular effect.
Monday, 18 May 2009
White Mischief
Senegal du Soleil’. Photograph by Léonard de Silva. Paris Vogue, May 1972, © Paris Vogue
The use of local people as accessories takes a more disturbing turn in this image, taken from an early 1970s edition of Paris Vogue. In the photograph, an European women dressed in white is contrasted with an African woman. On the left page of the magazine spread we have the African ‘savage’, naked save for some beads and a small garment around the waist. This outfit, or lack of outfit, starkly contrasts with the full-length, long-sleeved Western fashion item on the opposite page.
Martin Harrison has rightly argued that fashion photographs are made for the magazine page, and ‘taking them out of their original context can alter both the way we perceive them and, to some extent, their meaning’.[1] However, it is hard to imagine that this image would seem less strikingly racist when seen in the context of French Vogue. The image represent ‘memories of Out of Africa, White Mischief and the decadent pleasures of the white woman on the dark continent’,[2] but the most glaring message however is of the superiority of the European woman. Is it possible to believe that such images do not come with an ideological message attached?
In her essay ‘Fashion’s World Cities: London as Fashion Cosmopolis, 1945-79’ (published in Fashion’s World Cities, edited by Christopher Breward and David Gilbert) cultural historian Sonia Ashmore has analysed some of Vogue’s ethnographic imagery in the 1960s. She argues that examples from Vogue illustrate how the magazine maintained a difference between the indigenous ‘ethnic’ garments that it sometimes celebrated and their commodification and consumption by the West. She writes about the use of aestheticised exotic settings as a background for Western fashions, and argues that the photographers made no attempt at empathy with the local people they shot, and as such the colonial mentality is striking. She discusses a 1969 BritishVogue fashion spread (photographed by Norman Parkinson) entitled Ethiopia the Land of the Lion: ‘In one photograph a model, waited on by native “attendants”, wore a “borrowed” local wedding dress; on the facing page, she wears a black ciré catsuit, from Harrods “Way In” boutique, posed among semi-naked local women, the shiny black material intentionally echoing their skin colour. While this attempted a kind of physical rapprochement between “them and us”, the appropriation by the western wearer of ritual indigenous dress and the overt distinction made between the raw, naked “them”, and the smooth, modern “us”, remain uncomfortably apparent.’
The question needs to be asked however, whether, when contextualised in the era that produced them, do the images become less problematic? The racism might have been less apparent to contemporary consumers of French Vogue than to us, but the ideological message, that of French colonial possession and superiority would still have been absorbed: ‘Western interpretations only accentuate those elements of the exotic and the primitive that mirror their own aesthetic perception and pathological stereotypes, therefore perpetuating the colonialist legacy of exclusion, incorporation and domination.’[3]
[1] Martin Harrison, ‘Introduction’, in David Bailey and Martin Harrison, Shots of Style: Great Fashion Photographs, Chosen by David Bailey, V&A Publications/Faber & Faber, London, 1986, p. 14.
[2] McDowell, Fashion Today, p. 353.
[3] María Claudia André, ‘Frida and Evita: Latin American Icons for Export’, in Regina A. Root (ed.), The Latin American Fashion Reader, Berg Publishers, Oxford/London, 2005, p. 250.