Peter Claver wrote:

To be frank... that's my opinion of the fashion industry in general.. nevermind the photography of same.

+1

Robert Randall wrote:

You would have to be pretty desperate to call me up for a DKNY campaign. Now GAP, thats a totally different animal, you see, I'm beginning to get it.

I gave you the secret earlier! Look up

Robert Randall wrote:
For what I'm trying to find out, I'm asking the most right people there are. I already know what AD's and AB's will say, and for this, they don't count. You have no idea how much I'm learning from this and how much I hope it will help me. So far its been fantastic.

Cool, just asking questions.

Robert Szatmari wrote:
Bob, I don't think you're meant to "get it" . The Fashion world sticks close to the Avant Guarde and many movements in the art world aren't meant for everyone to get it either. If you look at fine art photographers like Wolfgang Tillmans or Jeff Wall, you might not get them and yet someone did and put them in a gallery or museum. So some editor will look and something and think its fresh or cutting edge in the simple pursuit of something different and put it in a magazine or ad campaign.

Sorry, I call bullshit. The day something as simple as an Avant Guarde movement is beyond me, is the day I move into the home. I've had a lifetime of watching people package bullshit while trying to sell it as something else. I'm way too hip for that to happen, I just don't seem very hip to the guys selling the bullshit. My search here is to hear a truth that I don't believe will be forthcoming, so I pound a little harder to get to it.

I was at the Art Institute of Chicago, standing right next to the curator and her friend, the curator of the LaSalle Bank collection (one of the largest, privately held art collections, in the world) the day the New Dutch photography movement was sold to the curator of the Art Institute. I know how it all works.

Robert Randall wrote:
Its unfortunate the "Photographer becomes famous by blog" thread was killed, because I think I was maybe getting somewhere. My problem stems from how differently many view fashion images. There can be a pristine editorial story by Steven Meisel that just simply kicks ass, in the same magazine as a story by some unknown horrible photographer, the images of which makes me want to vomit.

When I voice my opinion about the horrible images, many come to their defense with a statement saying that I simply don't get what goes on in the fashion world, and there fore I can't be expected to appreciate the art I'm viewing. I say bunk, they say elitist... off to war we go.

So, when the blacks are all plugged up, the patterns all get lost in the pampas grass backgrounds, the light is so hard you can cut diamonds with it if only you could find them in the images, the highlights are blown so hard even a hooker wouldn't demand payment... why do you defend it? What am i not getting.

Can we use Scott Schuman again as an example to argue about, and this time no fighting?

http://thesartorialist.blogspot.com/

Oh, I forgot, the thing that prompted this post was something someone said in the other post about how Schuman finds subjects that stand out sartorially. That part I get. I also get what he is doing with his blog and the incumbent pictures on it. What I don't get is why DKNY hired him to shoot a campaign for them.

Can we play nice this time? I promise I will try my hardest to as well.

I usually read but don't post because everyone is entitled to their opinion. BUT
this thread needs to be defined better.
Not all Fashion photography can or should be lumped in one category. In fact there are 3 basic categories with many off shoot of those..
from "Fashion Photography-A Professional Approach (auth Lucille Khornak)
1)Editorial Fashion Photography ..An anything goes approach only limited by the restraints of the Magazine's Art director on a Creative Photographer
2)Advertorial Fashion photography.. A campaign layout by a customer, shot by a photographer with little input to the finished AD
3)Catalog photography...simple photos where the selling item is the main subject
photographer has little to no input..
from "Fashion Photography Course-an essential guide (auth Eliot Siegel) he describes "Editorial" as free rein photography, a story
"Advertorial" as made to look editorial but actually layout by the customer
"Catalog" as boring , no input, BUT the cash cow.

I thing the problem with this thread is the Editorials are trying to be explained...and someones "Free Rein" is so different from someone else's that people get confused when they try to lump them all together..
by the way.. I like Patrick Demarchelier's work the best..

Robert Randall wrote:

Sorry, I call bullshit. The day something as simple as an Avant Guarde movement is beyond me, is the day I move into the home. I've had a lifetime of watching people package bullshit while trying to sell it as something else. I'm way too hip for that to happen, I just don't seem very hip to the guys selling the bullshit. My search here is to hear a truth that I don't believe will be forthcoming, so I pound a little harder to get to it.

I was at the Art Institute of Chicago, standing right next to the curator and her friend, the curator of the LaSalle Bank collection (one of the largest, privately held art collections, in the world) the day the New Dutch photography movement was sold to the curator of the Art Institute. I know how it all works.

Please do tell the story of the purchase of The dutch movement? In another thread of coarse

AL COOLEY PHOTOGRAPHY wrote:
I usually read but don't post because everyone is entitled to their opinion. BUT
this thread needs to be defined better.
Not all Fashion photography can or should be lumped in one category. In fact there are 3 basic categories with many off shoot of those..
from "Fashion Photography-A Professional Approach (auth Lucille Khornak)
1)Editorial Fashion Photography ..An anything goes approach only limited by the restraints of the Magazine's Art director on a Creative Photographer
2)Advertorial Fashion photography.. A campaign layout by a customer, shot by a photographer with little input to the finished AD
3)Catalog photography...simple photos where the selling item is the main subject
photographer has little to no input..
from "Fashion Photography Course-an essential guide (auth Eliot Siegel) he describes "Editorial" as free rein photography, a story
"Advertorial" as made to look editorial but actually layout by the customer
"Catalog" as boring , no input, BUT the cash cow.

I thing the problem with this thread is the Editorials are trying to be explained...and someones "Free Rein" is so different from someone else's that people get confused when they try to lump them all together..
by the way.. I like Patrick Demarchelier's work the best..

Patrick was a client of mine for about 5 years, I did his BW fine art retouching. He is a wonderful photographer, and a fine example to point out all 3 styles of fashion photography that you mention, as well as fine art work he is noted for.

La Seine by the Hudson wrote:
Except that I get the essential style statement I'm trying to make time and again. Most don't.

Mr. Randall wrote:
! Now, if you can just explain to me what that is, I think I can go home happy. No mumbo jumbo, I won't understand stuff, just a full in my face explanation.[/b].

What follows is my opinion based on having lived in NYC, perhaps it is useful.

I think what is missing in this discussion is the environment of the city and how it affects the people who reside in it, i.e. the back story.

In La Seine by the Hudson's portfolio: I find the waif, the escape, the pleasure of isolation within ones tiny apartment. For other fashion photogs it might be the ultra-rich faerie land, none really live in but many aspire to. Photoshopped images so refined they look like a mannequin - a new unreality of perfection.

In Mr. Randall's portfolio: I find fairly traditional mid-western values, extremely well done. Images that reflect a very specific social influence.

I arrived in NYC with, to say the least, a very rural outlook. My first ride on the subway during rush hour reminded me more of pushing sheep through a shoot and into a truck for market. A lot more mass than actual transit. It was in this place I truly understood the gun control debate.

After having lived in the city for 2 years and seeing all these posters on busses, subways, benches, in fact almost everywhere there was free space (which there is so little in NYC) with the letters DKNY, I turned to my love and asked. "WTF is Dickny?"

After the laughter died out, I was given the lecture and enlightened.

One cannot erase the smell of urine in summer or the sight of a homeless woman pissing in front of the magnificent W.R. Grace building, everyone passing on as though nothing was amiss or the least unusual. Celebrities abound and are treated with practiced indifference. Everyone is human, here, but many are looking for something outside themselves. Excitement, career, advancement, whatever... They practice their style everyday.

One can find the starkest realities of East New York coming in from Kennedy to the opulence of the Waldorf and the surrounding investment banking houses in Mid-Town. Billionaires pushing out the millionaires. Where $100,000 a year income can constitute the need for publicly supported housing.

LA Seine is shooting that backdrop as much as he his shooting the model. It is implicit, as I see it. Those same backdrop props are implicit in the blog despite being cities in Europe. The basic context being Bresson shooting fashion. The perfect image is irrelevant to the internal discussion. Neither can forego their cultural experience.

It might be heroin chic, or Warhol commercialism. It might be rich and famous. Crude image construction, you say? So, is the CITY in which we live. Show us life and fashion is life to the many who appreciate it.

DKNY, I think, is partly rejecting the overly photoshopped construct for now and going to show us fashion in place; used in daily lives, amazed by the wonderful lady who just showed up on the subway platform that smells of all our unimportant lives passing through and, yet, we wish it otherwise.

God, how I miss THE CITY. And given a choice to shoot with La Seine or Mr. Randall, both of whom are wonderful photographers, is there any doubt which I would choose? You either feel it or you don't, no judgement. You just have had to live there long enough to appreciate it. I could make fun of it before I lived there, but never again.

JMF Photography wrote:

La Seine by the Hudson wrote:
Except that I get the essential style statement I'm trying to make time and again. Most don't.

What follows is my opinion based on having lived in NYC, perhaps it is useful.

I think what is missing in this discussion is the environment of the city and how it affects the people who reside in it, i.e. the back story.

In La Seine by the Hudson's portfolio: I find the waif, the escape, the pleasure of isolation within ones tiny apartment. For other fashion photogs it might be the ultra-rich faerie land, none really live in but many aspire to. Photoshopped images so refined they look like a mannequin - a new unreality of perfection.

In Mr. Randall's portfolio: I find fairly traditional mid-western values, extremely well done. Images that reflect a very specific social influence.

I arrived in NYC with, to say the least, a very rural outlook. My first ride on the subway during rush hour reminded me more of pushing sheep through a shoot and into a truck for market. A lot more mass than actual transit. It was in this place I truly understood the gun control debate.

After having lived in the city for 2 years and seeing all these posters on busses, subways, benches, in fact almost everywhere there was free space (which there is so little in NYC) with the letters DKNY, I turned to my love and asked. "WTF is Dickny?"

After the laughter died out, I was given the lecture and enlightened.

One cannot erase the smell of urine in summer or the sight of a homeless woman pissing in front of the magnificent W.R. Grace building, everyone passing on as though nothing was amiss or the least unusual. Celebrities abound and are treated with practiced indifference. Everyone is human, here, but many are looking for something outside themselves. Excitement, career, advancement, whatever... They practice their style everyday.

One can find the starkest realities of East New York coming in from Kennedy to the opulence of the Waldorf and the surrounding investment banking houses in Mid-Town. Billionaires pushing out the millionaires. Where $100,000 a year income can constitute the need for publicly supported housing.

LA Seine is shooting that backdrop as much as he his shooting the model. It is implicit, as I see it. Those same backdrop props are implicit in the blog despite being cities in Europe. The basic context being Bresson shooting fashion. The perfect image is irrelevant to the internal discussion. Neither can forego their cultural experience.

It might be heroin chic, or Warhol commercialism. It might be rich and famous. Crude image construction, you say? So, is the CITY in which we live. Show us life and fashion is life to the many who appreciate it.

DKNY, I think, is partly rejecting the overly photoshopped construct for now and going to show us fashion in place; used in daily lives, amazed by the wonderful lady who just showed up on the subway platform that smells of all our unimportant lives passing through and, yet, we wish it otherwise.

God, how I miss THE CITY. And given a choice to shoot with La Seine or Mr. Randall, both of whom are wonderful photographers, is there any doubt which I would choose? You either feel it or you don't, no judgement. You just have had to live there long enough to appreciate it. I could make fun of it before I lived there, but never again.

Raw!

JMF Photography wrote:
God, how I miss THE CITY. And given a choice to shoot with La Seine or Mr. Randall, both of whom are wonderful photographers, is there any doubt which I would choose? You either feel it or you don't, no judgement. You just have had to live there long enough to appreciate it. I could make fun of it before I lived there, but never again.

While I've never lived there, I've been there often enough to understand your essay. I have more industry friends there than here. Here I have a rep that won't carry what a rep there will. Here I have art buyers that buy from NYC simply because they think its better or different, there I have art buyers that buy from me because they think I'm different or better. Silly on both counts. And then there are the AD's, both there and here, that think we all suck, and they head out to LA for the weather. And there is no finer truth than that one!

While your essay is point on for you, its only one answer, and it only answers the question from your perspective. To assume midwest values define my position is silly to me, its nothing but the "you will never understand it if you have to ask" bullshit I've been spoon fed during this entire discussion, you've just done a better job of it than most. However, to assume midwest values drive the imagery on my website is undoubtedly true; I can hardly do heroin chic for cotton farmers... unless Vogue asks me to. Now that would be a fun one, wouldn't it?

Robert Randall wrote:

Sorry, I call bullshit. The day something as simple as an Avant Guarde movement is beyond me, is the day I move into the home. I've had a lifetime of watching people package bullshit while trying to sell it as something else. I'm way too hip for that to happen, I just don't seem very hip to the guys selling the bullshit. My search here is to hear a truth that I don't believe will be forthcoming, so I pound a little harder to get to it.

I was at the Art Institute of Chicago, standing right next to the curator and her friend, the curator of the LaSalle Bank collection (one of the largest, privately held art collections, in the world) the day the New Dutch photography movement was sold to the curator of the Art Institute. I know how it all works.

JMX Photography wrote:
I haven't rread the whole thread, but I agree that some fashion photography is wonderful with high quality production values.  Other times it looks like a snap shot taken with a Kodak Disc camera in the middle of the day.  I also don't "get it."  Maybe there wa a point to it when everything was slick and polished, then a grungey image would stick out, but now parts of W or V are like flipping through a pile of old family pictures.  I almost expecting to see part of a thumb covering the lens one of these days.  "Oh look, it's soooo horribly different it must be Avant Guard!" or "I don't understand it so it must be good!" of "It's the perfect deconstruction and distillation of the post-post-post modern era vapid, void, while full and busy, I'm exhuberent!"

Yep, pretty much. I've seen some AMAZING fashion work and other stuff that is simply and utterly crap. No amount of posturing or high-brow bullshit is going to make me see the crap as anything more.

Robert Randall wrote:
While I've never lived there, I've been there often enough to understand your essay. I have more industry friends there than here. Here I have a rep that won't carry what a rep there will. Here I have art buyers that buy from NYC simply because they think its better or different, there I have art buyers that buy from me because they think I'm different or better. Silly on both counts. And then there are the AD's, both there and here, that think we all suck, and they head out to LA for the weather. And there is no finer truth than that one!

While your essay is point on for you, its only one answer, and it only answers the question from your perspective. To assume midwest values define my position is silly to me, its nothing but the "you will never understand it if you have to ask" bullshit I've been spoon fed during this entire discussion, you've just done a better job of it than most. However, to assume midwest values drive the imagery on my website is undoubtedly true; I can hardly do heroin chic for cotton farmers... unless Vogue asks me to. Now that would be a fun one, wouldn't it?

LOL- heroin chic to cotton farmers! It would be a great satirical study. You should shoot it!

Look, really it doesn't even come down to the photography does it? You shoot your market to make the money. He shoots his for the same reason. In the end it comes down to who is the buyer and for what reason, as you rightly point out. There is a lot of the grass is greener, though. The fashion editors are selecting out what they want and they can no more escape themselves than you or I can.

One of the big deals in NY was a guy who shot BJ's and blew them up to huge sizes. Did I really just write that? Very big hit. Who knew? Hey, I didn't perceive a lot of artistry, but then I'm a hick. What do I know?

It seems to me, you are asking a question that in the end has very little to do with actual photography and very much to do with an individuals filtered perceptions of a particular image. So, there can never be just one truth, nor can we ever answer it for you. We can only convey our perceptions and interpretations of it. You have every right to call it BS, though.

Lumigraphics wrote:
Yep, pretty much. I've seen some AMAZING fashion work and other stuff that is simply and utterly crap. No amount of posturing or high-brow bullshit is going to make me see the crap as anything more.

Who says it is amazing? Who says it is crap? Who is in charge of these ideals?

Robert Szatmari wrote:

Well, that's my point Bob, Its the Emperor's New Clothes. Its those who are in power are the ones who get to say what is good and what is not. That's what Marcel Duchamp was attacking back in the 1900s when he put a urinal in a gallery. I don't think you're going get a satisfying answer to your question.

JMF Photography wrote:
LOL- heroin chic to cotton farmers! It would be a great satirical study. You should shoot it!

Look, really it doesn't even come down to the photography does it? You shoot your market to make the money. He shoots his for the same reason. In the end it comes down to who is the buyer and for what reason, as you rightly point out. There is a lot of the grass is greener, though. The fashion editors are selecting out what they want and they can no more escape themselves than you or I can.

One of the big deals in NY was a guy who shot BJ's and blew them up to huge sizes. Did I really just write that? Very big hit. Who knew? Hey, I didn't perceive a lot of artistry, but then I'm a hick. What do I know?

It seems to me, you are asking a question that in the end has very little to do with actual photography and very much to do with an individuals filtered perceptions of a particular image. So, there can never be just one truth, nor can we ever answer it for you. We can only convey our perceptions and interpretations of it. You have every right to call it BS, though.

Your essay really did rock hard.

I think the biggest problem for many here is that only a few people really understand what I'm asking, and I don't know if they are going to be able to answer me. If I explain any further, I'll just be digging a hole I can't get out of, and I want answers, not exercise.

Robert Randall wrote:
I think the biggest problem for many here is that only a few people really understand what I'm asking, and I don't know if they are going to be able to answer me. If I explain any further, I'll just be digging a hole I can't get out of, and I want answers, not exercise.

Cool. But, to directly answer the question in your OP of defending fashion photography or piss poor technique... I don't. There is nothing to defend and that I think is the issue.

I will leave it to those who practice the black arts of Fashion Photography to attempt to answer your question and defend themselves.

BTW - Mr. Randall if you ever hold a PS or photography workshop here in Denver. I'd happily pay to attend and promptly become hopelessly lost - LOL. You truly do great photographic work and I pay attention to your posts to learn from you. Thanks, for all your effort.

QOL wrote:
My stab it.

They are images that have absolutely nothing to do with photography. If he could beam what he thinks directly into our brains from his mind he wouldn't bother using a camera at all. Cameras and photography are minor inconveniences that need to be overcome for him to make his statement. His real audience is similar.. if you asked them what they are looking at none would say a photograph.

Ceci n'est pas une photograph.

Ped le pah!

Might be spelled wrong

Robert Randall wrote:
Might be spelled wrong

Oui.

Garry k wrote:
Funny those Bondage Elitists tell me the same thing ....

And they often refer to it as their "art "

but at the end of the day , capable and interesting photography stands on its own merit regardless of the genre

Bondage Elitists.
How droll!

Robert Randall wrote:
I think the biggest problem for many here is that only a few people really understand what I'm asking, and I don't know if they are going to be able to answer me. If I explain any further, I'll just be digging a hole I can't get out of, and I want answers, not exercise.

Doesn't this, in a way, sort of illustrate the original premise?

Alexander Image wrote:
For me this thread looks like a commercial photographer is talking about how to do fashion photography…

Do you consider yourself to be a fashion photographer, and if so, may I comment on your work? It won't be pleasant, but it might help me to explain myself better.

Robert Randall wrote:

Do you consider yourself to be a fashion photographer, and if so, may I comment on your work? It won't be pleasant, but it might help me to explain myself better.

You can do what you want. I don't mind.

Alexander Image wrote:
For me this thread looks like a commercial photographer is talking about how to do fashion photography…

that thread was one of the best and civil i have seen on MM for a while
until you came with your one sentence statement and make it the usual MM crap
the worst obviously is you know nothing about both
tb

BYS wrote:

that thread was one of the best and civil i have seen on MM for a while
until you came with your one sentence statement and make it the usual MM crap
the worst obviously is you know nothing about both
tb

seconded

Robert Randall wrote:
Do you consider yourself to be a fashion photographer, and if so, may I comment on your work? It won't be pleasant, but it might help me to explain myself better.

Alexander Image wrote:
You can do what you want. I don't mind.

It doesn't work unless you are a fashion photographer, so are you?