Hello everyone!
As you know, I’ve started to tell you all about Fashion Photography in my previous blog post. Today, we will continue to talk about that!
Steichen Coming to the Stage
After De Meyer, who was called a pictorialist, Steichen took fashion photography to modernism. Born in Luxembourg in 1879 and taken to America as a baby, Steichen exhibited both his photographs and paintings in pictorialist halls in the 1890s, and was discovered by Clarance H. White in 1900 and introduced to Stieglitz. He started working with Stieglitz and played a major role in organizing the exhibition for the Gallery 219. Together they founded “Camera Work”, so Steichen also designed the first cover.
Steichen was not exactly a “photographer” until that time, since before the First World War he spent most of his time painting in France. His level of knowledge in Symbolism, Expressionism and Cubism played an important role in directing Stieglitz’s interest in these areas. During this period, Steichen began to take portraits of the wealthy people of Paris and New York, as well as his paintings, landscape photographs in the symbolist style, and New York city photographs, which he later destroyed almost all of it.
Like many photographers before, Steichen was under the influence of De Meyer and even his name is mentioned among the pictorialist photographers in many sources. However, after the First World War, Steichen became interested in Dynamic Symmetry Theory and this interest led him away from the pictorialist approach of the period to modernism.
Steichen and American Vogue
Working with Condé Nast since 1923 and also a freelance advertising photographer, Steichen developed the concept of “new objectivity” in photography in order to create ingenious photographs in the fashion and advertising sectors, which were still considered a new and fresh field in the 1920s.
Geometry dominates Steichen’s photographs. Instead of De Meyer’s fairy-tale and soft focus atmosphere, he produced clearer and simpler works. Like De Meyer, Steichen set an example for many photographers with this new style he created. Perhaps because Steichen was the first photographer to understand not only photography but also fashion, he is considered the first fashion photographer in history.
After starting to work with Vogue, Steichen started meeting designers and started to think about how to present the product better. Again, working with the fashion editor of a magazine for the first time, Steichen took the first steps of the concept of fashion photography as we understand it today.
George Hoyningen-Huene and Parisian Vogue
When Steichen was hired as chief photographer for Vogue of America in 1923, Baron George Hoyningen-Huene began working as an assistant photographer at Paris Vogue at the same time. Hoyningen-Huene, who was an example of Steichen’s style in the early days, like most of the photographers of that period, soon became the chief photographer of the magazine and developed a new style of his own. The most important feature in the artist’s photographs is that the model is positioned outside the midpoint for the first time. Apart from that, he tried to give a cross-section of life in his photographs, took care to have an emotion loaded in the expressions of the models, and saved them from appearing lifeless. The most famous and well-known photograph is the beach series, which looks like an outdoor shot even though it was taken in the studio. Perhaps because he was in Paris, Huene’s style was not as widespread as Steichen’s.
Realism and Surrealism in Fashion Photography
Hungarian photographer Martin Munkacsi took a realistic approach in his running model photographs taken with a low shutter speed, both for exterior shots and for photographing movement, and created a revolution.
Munkacsi replaced De Meyer at Harper’s Bazaar. In fact, it cannot be said that Munkacsi, who was a sports photographer before, acted very consciously about fashion photography, but he applied his experience from sports photography to fashion photography, causing a radical change in fashion photography. After Munkacsi, outdoor spaces have been used for fashion shoots, and sports and athletic models have been worked with. Although this realist trend in photography emerged in America, the fact that the Hungarian photographer Munkacsi was the first to apply realism in fashion photography by photographing a model running on the beach in a swimsuit, is an indication that even this “seemingly new” period was imported from Europe. However, the effect of realism in Europe was not as great as in America.
American female photographer Toni Frissel, who shot the exterior shots for Vogue in 1939 for the promotion of fur, is one of the photographers who combines the “imaging” technique of natural environments and documentary photography with angled shots and simple silhouettes.
In the 1930s, with the spread of images in which the imagination was used extensively in the field of fashion, the interest in psychoanalysis increased and the effect of the surrealist art movement began to be seen in photography. Surrealists do not rely on well-proven analysis or one-to-one calculation, and even consider such prescriptive approaches to stifle the imagination. Their passion for expressing their creative powers has dragged other Surrealists into a completely different realm that includes dreams, drunkenness, sexual satisfaction and even madness. Techniques such as superimposition, combination of prints, photomontage and solarization used in the works of Man Ray and Maurice Tabard, who are among the most important names of surrealism in photography, dramatically reflect the combination of reality and imagination. Other photographers have used some methods such as rotation and distortion in order to make their works mysterious.
The continued interest in the fusion of reality and fantasy combined with the awareness created by the war on people in the 1940s, and fashion photography was naturally influenced by this.
But how?
We will see this together in the next blog post.
Stay tuned…
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