Fashion Photography

Fashion Photography has been in existence since the early days of photography. In 1856, Adolphe Braun published a book containing 288 photographs of Virginia Oldoini, Countess di Castiglione; the photos depict her in her official court garb, making her the first fashion model. In the first decade of the 20^th century advances in halftone printing allowed for fashion photography to be featured in magazines. In 1905 Conde Nast brought vogue magazine and contributed to the beginnings of fashion photography, he then moved the magazine overseas and introduced it too countries like France, Spain and the United Kingdom. From there the magazine’s profits and publications increased and by 1911 it had evolved into the business it is today.   

A portrait is a picture of the person within the frame, whether it be manipulated by props or other means whereas a fashion photograph is a picture of the items in the frame not the model, an example of this would be that famous clothing brands like vogue will do a modelling shoot for their brand not the model.  

For a photograph to get into a fashion magazine they manipulate the image heavily, almost to the point where everything in the image is artificial. This is done by using a variety of techniques both before the photograph is taken and after. Even the models are manipulated because they have very strict diet and lifestyle choice, the very first thing they would do is to choose the right model for the chosen outfit; from there they would choose a theme for the shoot that would fit the product that they are trying to advertise. The model is then heavily altered with makeup more often than not to look artificial, the props are then chosen to collaborate with the theme and the lighting will either be natural if they were to be outside or could be artificial. When they shoot the model they often take a large number of photographs and normally only one maybe included in there magazine, sometimes even none of them are chosen because the editor may not like the colouring, the model or even the items of clothing that been chosen. After the photo have been taken they are often also heavily edited using computer software such as adobe photoshop, this may be done if the editor likes what they see in the frame but have queries with things like colour, the texture of the person skin, often models are airbrushed, this is too remove any imperfections they have and to also enhance certain features of them such as the neck, eyes and lips.

There is a clash between the creative side and commercial side of fashion photography because the commercial side wants to make money and would normally go with popular trends to achieve this. This hinders the creative side because creativity isn't necessarily popular especially in huge companies like vogue. The editor is normally the one, who picks the photographs for the magazine, and they will often reject loads of photograph on the basis that they would like to see a certain trend to be presented furthermore they could also rejects photographs on the basis that the model isn’t right, this could be seen as a biased attitude as they go with what they think will make them popular and don’t really care about how creative there shoots are.