ABSTRACT
Fashion Photography has traditionally been regarded as the lightweight end of photographic practice. Given the prevalent critical and historical attitude, photographers are inclined to regard the ‘captured’ moment, as opposed to the contrived, stylised fashion shoot, as the most powerful point in the photographic process, the point at which the ‘real’ world reproduces itself. Throughout the 1980s and as the 1990s progress, fashion photography reflects more and more the segmentation of the fashion market-place – between mass production at one end and couture at the top. Some have interpreted the strange, unusual settings in the work of Guy Bourdin and Helmut Newton as the intrusion of a ‘real world’ into fashion photography. In the work of one of the best women fashion photographers, Deborah Turbeville, a different sense of the alien nature of the image is represented as a sort of hesitation between self-images.
