Monthly Archives: March 2024

Archive: previously published as a review for PhotoForum, 1995

There is a certain duplicity in fashion, at least as practiced in the capitalist economies.On the one hand, it can be seen as a liberating force through the 20th century, and on the other, it has bound women (in the main) into fixed concepts of style, beauty, and body image.
Maybe its just that fashion tried to keep up with the continuing stages of liberation that inevitably followed the constraints of last century – anyone could wear the signs of their freedom. The market knew where the new money would be coming from, and raced to keep up with that sector.
At this time the market could be seen as filling a needed style, although, at some point it became the dictator of these styles. This probably happened as a consequence of the developments in large quantity printing, the introduction of fine quality illustrations, and then photographs. These gave rise to large distribution magazines and a quantum leap in the visual appeal of advertising. Couple this with the development of synthetic fabrics and automation of clothing production, which made cheaper (and less durable) apparel, and the fashion industry was ready to control the changing of clothing styles. It was in their interest to change fashions as often as possible.

There seems to have always been a desirable body shape for women (by men, and thus by women) through the ages, although this shape has been quite different at different times. One would have thought that the liberations that women have undergone in this century could have addressed this constraint once and for all. Instead, through the media, the ideal shape that prevails in our time is forced even more strongly on women. It also seems that there has been a stronger emphasis on desirable male body shape in the last decade.

By attempting neutrality on these issues, fashion has been complicit in imposing these restrictive body shapes on women. Similarly, by displaying a politically neutral show such as ‘Worth To Dior’, the Auckland City Art Gallery invites criticism. You could be forgiven for thinking you’d walked into a mid-century museum display. But why should an art gallery treat clothing in any other way?
Well, art practices of the 70’s and 80’s have shown clearly that art (and life) is a political act. The subject matter of an artist, the presentation, the viewpoint, and the space in which the work is presented, are all decisions that stem from a particular view of the world. There is no neutral viewpoint, and so each decision is a political one, each depends on the politics of the artist. The decisions involved in creating or exhibiting a show are imbued with their own politics, those of the curator, the designer, and the gallery manager.

But what are we seeing in this exhibition?
We see costumes for the rich and famous; “dresses of which fairytales were made.” The costumes are presented as marvellous and unaffordable for most – the ultimate in exclusive clothing. The presentation is designed to impress, to overawe even. There is a conspicuous lack of discussion regarding the wider implications of the clothes, their wearers, and their creators. In fact we are given to believe that there are no implications, that they exist for a make believe world.

But a real world existed around this “golden age” which included two world wars and a lot of sweated labour, both of relevance to this industry.

When Charles Worth started creating his dresses for royalty, it was difficult for women to possess wealth in their own name. They were considered to be virtually the chattels of their husbands. The clothing was paid for, and was used to conspicuously display the wealth of these upper class men. The clothing was physically constraining and unsuitable for many activities. How had things changed by the ‘50s? Despite women having much more freedom in society, Christian Dior could still refer to women’s use of fashion as “the simple art of pleasing.”

During the Nazi occupation of France, Catherine Dior, his sister, spent 10 months in Ravensbruck concentration camp because of her work in the Resistance. On her release, Dior gave her clothes from Lucien Lelong, his then employer. Gaunt and thin, she said that it was “ the only time in my life that I was able to fit into his model sized clothes.”

The H line that Dior designed in 1954 involved the ‘Tudor’ bodice, shown so well in the ‘Worth To Dior’ advertisement. This was intended to lift the breasts to increase their distance from the waist, for visual appeal. And referring to the corsetry required for the 1947 ‘New Look’, Dior said that “without foundations there would be no fashion.” Women’s bodies were still being constrained and moulded for the pleasure of men.

As far as the second world war goes, it seems that couture fashion, where it could, would fall in with whoever had political control. For example, England, and to a lesser extent America, were forced to undergo austerity measures which put controls on the amount of fabric used in a dress, skirt length, and the number of pleats and pockets. Meanwhile, in occupied Paris, many fashion houses kept on producing flamboyant clothing and hats. Nazi Germany intended to take over Paris culture for its own, and haute couture fell into the category of a protected luxury trade and so had access to the fabrics they needed. Some magazines, like Paris Vogue, and some designers closed down rather than become involved with the Nazi interest in couture. But many, including the houses of Worth, Piguet, and Lelong remained open for the full duration of the Nazi occupation of France. Lelong commented that every meter of fabric wasted in France was a metre less that would be sent to Germany. A desperate defence.

In all areas of clothing production, manual labour has always been a big component. Although mass production came to other industries, clothing has never seen the same input of technology although the potential has often been there, even in the fashion industry. Compared with other industries, there is little difference to be seen between the outworkers and small scale (labour driven) factories in use today, and the ‘little dressmaker’ and sweated labour shops of 100 years ago. Perhaps the main difference today is that developing countries are used in order to keep labour costs down. Additionally, the country of production is often changed when another offers a lower rate. Thus it is these workers who have been subsidising the demand for fast turn-around, low batch run, seasonally changing fashions.

Remembering that all art has a political component, why is it that the gallery has ignored any wider issues of fashion clothing and instead given us a bland museum display?

Recently, the Auckland City Council has forced the gallery to be partially self- funding. From the many possibilities, the chosen methods have been to charge for special exhibitions and to seek sponsorship. While the former requires an interested audience (or advertising to create one), the latter requires that potential sponsors see a surefire, easy product to associate their name with. Nothing with possibilities of controversy or negative publicity.
What could be better than a display of clothes? So it seems that this show is but a commercial venture – a crowd puller with superficial content.
Unfortunately, the gallery has treaded too conservatively in order to create a financial winner.

Sources:
Chic Thrills ed. Juliet Ash and Elizabeth Wilson
Dior in Vogue Brigid Keenan
Understanding Fashion Elizabeth Rouse
Worth To Dior exhibition catalogue

“Worth To Dior” showed at the Auckland City Art Gallery over the period 6 March – 7 May 1995.

S. Sontier

Archive: written under pseudonym, fake publication, published in PhotoForum newsletter 1995

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Taken from XYZ magazine, April 1995, the following article is part of a speech given by Dr Lynley Forber at the Californian Institute of Learning in February 1995.

“It seems to be confirmed – photography’s days are numbered. And I think well within our lifetime we will see the demise, after 152 years, of this art form, at least as we understand it now.

Physically, several important items make this demise imminent; several of the raw materials are rapidly becoming scarce or highly expensive (one often implies the other) – the silver used in almost all black and white photography, and the rapid rise in the cost of paper are just two of the most significant. Oil, which is used as the basis of several components in colour chemistry, and in the film base of both black and white, and colour films, while at a low right now, is destined to rise in price in the next 50 years unless major new oil-fields are soon discovered.
Also the almost complete domination of colour in the snapshot market, makes the use of black and white the domain of classic documentary and landscape photographers, and a dwindling commercial area. All of these factors are weighed by manufacturers in decisions in future directions.

On the technological side, digital image systems are well advanced now, and the computational power of many home machines is enough to display and manipulate high resolution images. The main limitations here are the size of storage media, and the band width needed for digital transmission of images. These are both areas which are already receiving huge input in research, and so only a few years should suffice before we have the ability to store hundreds of photographic quality images on a standard hard drive and to send or receive these images down phone, ISDN, or cable TV lines. With rapid advancement in network technology and Internet, we will be able to scan through images stored in many parts of the world in the same way we flip the pages of a photo album What about the front end? The camera? Sure, the resolution of digital cameras is poor, at least in those that cost less than $20,000. But here again the market is moving rapidly. The standards have been set and the patents already filed, and the market is primed for introduction of high quality digital image capture devices aimed at the consumer. I hesitate to call these cameras, and I believe so will the advertisers. There will be no need for glass or plastic lenses. The thing will not even look like a camera. It will have functions that could not even be considered by analogue camera designers – no matter how much microelectronics they squeeze into their packages.

The media, the largest consumer of imagery, has been moving to digital methods for probably 10 years now. For them, it is concerns of speed of delivery, (and cost) above all. We have already got pixel rates high enough for media photographers to be using digital cameras, and within 5 years, pixel rate will deliver as standard, images at the quality of 25 ASA film on a 120 roll. But more, capture technology will make ASA less important, with low light CCD managing 1/125 sec in moonlight.

And I think this is the crux of my case for the demise of photography. Kodak and Fuji and the rest are ready to redefine all the terms of photography, and with them, the concepts. People will not think of a single fixed image any more, although they may still exist. Digital allows the complete transformation of gathered information, visual, auditory or textual. It also allows for the combining of these. We will come to see visual information connected with sounds, animated graphics, and texts (I exclude touch and smell, as no one has yet conquered these senses reliably and remotely, but it would be foolish not to expect to see them in use at some time in the future). In fact we will not be able to distinguish if the information is primarily visual, sound based, or textual. There will be no need to, because this information clump will have a new name (and it is not for me to name that, leave it to the advertisers and PR companies) and a definition of its own. The very notion of the image is under attack now. We will expect as the norm, images with embedded text such as captions, background details or historical information. Or with sounds (voice overs, or actual sound from a news event). But the primacy of the image will be gone. Moreover, control of this information will be up to us. For example, Blind people would filter the image part, as being useless to them. There will be a hierarchy of information levels and content, that the individual could choose to receive or not. This idea can already be seen happening in a rudimentary way, with the self-designed online newspapers which are being implemented. Here one selects the areas one is interested in and the paper-builder software creates a paper with only what you want to read.

On the Fine Art front, there has been a steady decline in the use of the fine photographic print, with the Starn Brothers being only two of many artists laying this notion to rest, with their explorations of the nature of the medium of photography, above the content. As with painting, when the medium itself was explored, there came a crisis.
Painting has (it could be argued) survived, but this crisis for photography, what with the previous factors I’ve mentioned, I believe could be the last.

I see an ideological move away from “images” towards information as a whole, where the hermetically sealed image will be no more. I’m still not sure whether we are ready for it; whether it’s a good thing, but it really does mean photography as we know it is approaching its end.”

Lynley Forber

Archive: written for PhotoForum as an editorial, 1994

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As photographers, I assume we are all attempting to achieve some sort of results with the images we create. At this point in time, just over 150 years since the start of it all, and on the brink of major changes in image making and distribution, there needs to be serious consideration of the place and usefulness of photography.

Already, society has quite different ideas about photographic images than say 30 years ago.

I think it is true to say that most people can usually pick a so called documentary photograph i.e. one that is making some attempt at depicting a part of the world as it was at a particular time and place and camera angle. This goes hand in hand with the idea that if the photograph challenges our version of reality too drastically, we may question the circumstances of its making or even its authenticity. Many, for instance did not believe initially that the images of Nazi atrocities were genuine. But most people still believe there is at least something truthful in such images.

At the same time, the photographs don’t hold anywhere near the same power that they used to. Possibly from the over-abundance of images, and their juxtaposition with ads and other stories in the media, we find it easy to digest an article on anorexia, and a clothing ad with a skinny model on the same page, as just one of many examples. Images have become just part of a continuous line of entertainment, and we like just a little bit of shock in our entertainment.

If we make such images for use in the media we become complicit in the purveyoring of horror as entertainment. It is one thing to be committed to a cause as an imagemaker, but now there is such an abundance of images and issues, and the media is so specialised, that editors can pick and choose as they like.
So in a way, there are many more possible outlets, but fewer possibilities.

There are formal and informal rules on what can and can’t be printed, what stories will fit a particular media profile.
Editing (in the negative sense of the word) happens either by photographers self editing to sell the story, or by the editors’ concept of their audience.

As Noam Chomsky points out, the media is there to deliver an audience to a market. The audience is a strata of society, and the market is the advertisers. Most advertisers are interested in targeting a relatively comfortable, well off, politically conservative or uninterested group. So the media is there to deliver this group to them. A contained world view has to be given with not much scope for radicalism or activism. We have to be aware of where the media are at if we want to work with or use them.

Now, what about audiences? Firstly, people read or watch what they want to, and with the specialisation of the media, the audience is less likely to be struck by things that don’t conform to their world view. Secondly, I feel that people have become inured to virtually all images that can be thrown at them. We (the audience) can glibly watch starving, war torn, tragic events unfold on a screen, while we converse, eat, etc. Similarly, we can flip through Time, with Rwandan children dead and fly- blown, and remotely wonder about their collective fate.
But, this is the crunch.
We are not moved to do anything more than perhaps give a few dollars when a collector guilts us.

In a talk this year at Auckland University on conflict photography, Ron Brownson continually pointed out that many of the images he was showing were considered ‘too hard’ when they were made, and were not used at the time. Some were only released decades later. Presumably this was when their keepers decided that the images had lost enough of their rawness to be acceptable (and thus ineffective).

We are discouraged by the seeming complexity of the worlds’ problems. My belief is that problems smaller in scale stem from larger scale, more serious things, and these relate to a lack of respect of humanity, and a lack of vision of the future .The striving for a high consumption, ego based lifestyle, has given us a self centred, money oriented world, where true compassion has no part. And to my mind, this is where ‘concerned’ photography is letting itself down. It works within that ego and money based system, when it should be criticising it. It has not widened the boundaries that it can explore, and has been subsumed by the system, so that it just produces more fodder to be marketed. It seems hard to say, but what is the point of spending a lifetime, or risking a life, to get images, if they are to become entertainment and income for the mass media owners?

We are led to believe that art has a part to play in raising important questions that don’t come up in the daily course of life, or cannot be raised elsewhere. But here again, it seems that ‘art’ has been subsumed by the art market, and everything it produces is a potential consumable product. Dada, Conceptual, performance, fluxus etc. attempted to loosen themselves from the market, and recent artists like Hans Haake, Sherry Levine and Barbara Kruger have tried to show the workings of this market. but how successful have they been? It seems they too have become part of the widening scope of the market, and serve the same elite. Again the parameters are not wide enough. I think photographers working in the art market also need to look very closely at the system, and those who manipulate it.

Too many artists like to ignore these issues and carry on believing that they serve only their own goals, while still making work in order to survive.

If we do not face up to such things we inevitably serve those who have the power, by either our indifference or our active complicity.

Unfortunately, I have no answers to the problems I have tried to raise. In part, by raising them, I hope to get some interesting replies, which may suggest directions for these answers, and would be used in another newsletter to start a dialogue. (there were no interesting replies to this piece)

S. Sontier