The utopian "no-place" of the fashion photograph

Research output: Chapter in Book / Conference PaperChapter

Abstract

I began this discussion by asking what it means to erase the pages of a fashion magazine, a question for which there is no simple answer. Much more than an extreme attempt to bring about “the ruin of representation” (Bolt 2004), the project of Capurro’s AMPEdS, nonetheless, does enact the hope of return to a prelapsarian state of originary whiteness, where the fashion commodity and the commodified body of fashion have not yet come into being. However, against the power of mass commodity culture (for which Capurro’s Vogue is a synecdoche), no such return is possible; as Adam Bandt points out in his response to the erased pages, “the destruction of the fetishism of the commodity is thoroughly utopian” (Bandt 2004). And still, as Barthes and Wilson observed, there is something utopian about fashion photography. The goal in these pages, then, has been to interrogate what that “something” might be, to consider in what ways we can think of fashion photography as a utopian form. To this end, I looked to the genre of fashion photography that uses high-key (or low-key) lighting to isolate the fashion object and body against the plain white wall of the photographer’s studio. In this decontextualized “no-place,” the writable capacities— available to all fashion photography—are illuminated, spotlit without the distraction of mise-en-scène. Here, the metamorphoses of fashion come into being over and over again as new realities of body and dress are conjured into existence with the utopian promise of what could be. However, as I have argued, if fashion photography is to be considered utopian in the full sense of the word—as a “no-place” that is also a “good place”—it needs to be politically, as well as aesthetically, transformative. This is no mean feat; locked in embrace with its unethical seductions, fashion photography is far from innocent. But neither is it a place of stasis, and in its radical reimaginings of bodies that are neither fixed nor final, the utopian place of fashion photography is to be found.
Original languageEnglish
Title of host publicationFashion, Performance, and Performativity: The Complex Spaces of Fashion
EditorsAndrea Kollnitz, Marco Pecorari
Place of PublicationU.K.
PublisherBloomsbury Visual Arts
Pages145-160
Number of pages16
ISBN (Electronic)9781350106185
ISBN (Print)9781350106192
Publication statusPublished - 2022

Fingerprint

Dive into the research topics of 'The utopian "no-place" of the fashion photograph'. Together they form a unique fingerprint.

Cite this