Fashion Photography

Fashion Photography

Fashion Photography is a type of Photography devoted to displaying clothing and other fashion items. Fashion Photography is normally used for Advertisements or fashion magazines such as Vogue, Elle and Vanity Fair.
Photography was developed in the 1830s but the earliest popular technique, the daguerreotype, was unsuitable for mass printing.

In the first decade of the 20th century, advances in halftone printing allowed fashion photographs to be featured in magazines. Fashion photography made its first appearance in French magazines such as La mode practique. In 1909, Condé Nast took over Vogue magazine and also contributed to the beginnings of fashion photography.

Cecil Beaton

Sir Cecil Walter Hardy Beaton, CBE (14 January 1904 – 18 January 1980) was an English fashion and portrait photographer, diarist, interior designer and an Academy Award-winning stage and costume designer for films and the theatre. He was named to the International Best Dressed List Hall of Fame in 1970.
Beaton designed book jackets and costumes for charity matinees, learning the professional craft of photography at the studio of Paul Tanqueray, until Vogue took him on regularly in 1927.He was a photographer for the British edition of Vogue in 1931 when George Hoyningen-Huene, photographer for the French Vogue traveled to England.

When is an image a Portrait when is it a fashion photograph?

You can tell the difference between a portrait and a fashion photograph because when you see a fashion photograph you can tell that they are trying to sell the clothes and the atmosphere of the picture where as in a portrait photograph they are trying to see the person in the picture nothing else, they want to know the emotion that the person feels, the photographer does not seem to be worried about portraying the clothes.

Portraiture

Portraiture

Portraiture is the capture of the likeness of a person or a small group of people, in which the face and the expression is predominant.  Portraiture is the focus of the person's face in the photograph. Normally the person in the picture will be facing the camera and will be posing in a certain way. Unlike many other photography styles, the subjects of portraiture are often non-professional models.

Diane Arbus

Diane Arbus was an American photographer. In the early 1940s Diane's father employed her to take photographs for the department store's advertisements. Portraiture, the genre from which her fame arose, quickly became her focal point; this personal and sophisticated approach redefined documentary photography. She took photographs of people who wouldn't have been classed as "normal in the society" at the time or of people whose normality seems ugly. (dwarfs giants, transvestites, nudists, circus performers). Diane was fascinated by these people and wanted to know more about them.



Although some of Arbus's photographs have sold for hundreds of thousands of dollars at auction, Arbus's work has provoked controversy; for example, Norman Mailer was quoted in 1971 as saying "Giving a camera to Diane Arbus is like putting a live grenade in the hands of a child."