Vogue presents an aspirational dream and impacts the physical ideals of women around the globe. It’s difficult to take seriously Lindberg’s photograph of dancing girls after reading her post on “ Women Dancing Miserably In Western Art.”) There are two images in the exhibit inspired by John Everett Millais’s Ophelia, both featuring alabaster-skinned women swathed in ivory silk, floating amongst verdant ferns and lilies undeniably visually appealing in an art catalog, but of questionable message in the pages of a magazine.
HIGH FASHION ART PHOTOGRAPHY SERIES
(Mallory Ortberg’s series at The Toast subverts the pleasure we take in these images, by giving them deflationary captions, suggesting what the female models are really thinking. The art world has always loved a beautiful dead woman, and fashion is no different. That does not make the abundance of dead and deeply unhappy women in these photographs (or women playing dead) less shocking.
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Clifford Coffin / Museo Thyssen-Bornemisza The unimportance of the models is disturbing but hints at a refreshing truth: here is an honest admission that the fashion world is fundamentally unconcerned with human women.Ĭlifford Coffin draws on the surrealist work of Magritte and Salvador Dalí for 'Untitled,' 1949. A fanned-out dress in a 1992 shot by Nick Knight transforms the model into a swan, and an elaborately tiered garment in a Knight image from 2008 turns the model into a tower of pure magenta, like the stamen in a Georgia O’Keeffe flower painting. The best shots in the exhibit are those that emphasize the unreality of the fashion world, in which the clothes are exaggerated. These photographs don’t objectify or revere women: they revere light, shadow, and fabric. The empty dresses emit a glowing light, unfilled vessels that invite anyone to try them on. In some, the paintings’ female subjects have completely disappeared: Tim Walker’s 2004 photo of neon dresses floating in a tree resembles the paper lanterns of Sargent’s Carnation, Lily, Lily, Rose, but the girls in the original painting are gone. Works of art that featured round and dimply bodies arrayed in silks are now flattened and bleached, so that the female figures in them seem even less alive than when they were painted in oils. But although there are photos that feature women looking daringly straight at the camera (two versions of Vermeer’s Girl with a Pearl Earring), most of the models’ faces are obscured by hats, hair, ruffles, or simply positioning. Lucy Davies, an art and photography critic for The Telegraph, claims in her introduction to the catalogue that the photographs “revere rather than objectify women.” There are no gratuitously sexual images, and the occasional nipple is so powdered that bare torsos resemble Roman statuary. The glowing lights in Tim Walker’s 2004 ‘The Dress Lamp Tree,’ are reminiscent of the paper lanterns in John Singer Sargent’s 1885-6 ‘Carnation, Lily, Lily, Rose’ and René Magritte’s 1953 ‘Golconda.’ Tim Walker / Museo Thyssen-Bornemisza The dresses, though gorgeous, seem unlikely to ever be worn outside the frame-unattainable and therefore, the advertising logic goes, incredibly desirable. Their connections to these paintings elevates the photographic images to the realm of the untouchable. The dresses’ silhouettes resemble Degas’s Ballet Dancers in the Wings, connecting the past to the present in a lineage of cloth. The models’ faces are all twisted away from the camera, leaving only the suggestion of motion in their bodies and emphasizing the froth of cloth and embroidery that surrounds them. For his 2012 photograph, Peter Lindbergh posed four women in dancing in a circle around a tree, hands linked, looking away from one another in a construction that resembles Nicolas Poussin’s A Dance to the Music of Time and Matisse’s The Dance.
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The eye is drawn to the visual elements that connect the photo to the original painting, rather than to the subject of the piece itself. Moreover, the emphases of the images are sometimes eccentric.