“Fashion is an extension of dressing. It’s a very important social factor. It amuses me that fashion and fashion photography are treated so poorly intellectually. Cultural intellectuals tend to feel they’re not qualified to discuss fashion photography, or that it’s a waste of time. I even get correspondence across the forums at SHOWstudio from people who think fashion is evil. There’s a lack of understanding, a moral dismissal, and an anger that fashion, and by extension fashion photography, is a wasteful, criminal thing. I quite like that agitation and aggression, because I don’t believe it. In a society where your first encounter with people tends to be visual, you’re sort of saying “This is who I am.” I can’t imagine a society that doesn’t adorn and decorate itself and doesn’t use its outer appearance in some way as a social communication.” -Nick Knight, interviewed in Aperture 197
via goodmorningmidnight
4 comments:
This problem that you are describing affects fashion in so many different ways besides photography. I think fashion is underrated in what it means to culture.
xoxo
B* a la Moda
Sometimes I think that fear and resentment of the unfamiliar is a relic of some kind of primal survival instinct. If unchecked by the some sort of cognitive process, unbiased observation and analysis, is it that surprising that ignorance is maintained or that any societal vestiges of prejudice would rear their ugly head? Certainly beauty is in the eye of the beholder, but without an open mind that eye can be jaundiced. Fashion photography can be a portal to enlightenment and joy should one not shy away.
Oh so true - we live our lives surrounded by fashion, it affects us every day and yet there are people who want to put it down, call it frivolous, when they too are participating in it.
Chic on the Cheap
Hi!
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