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Photography EssayThe purpose of photography is to present to the viewer a view of the world that is not normally seen. With the advent of fashion photography however, the view of this world is skewered. Fashion models do not present a true reality but a make up world in which being in like manner fragile is regarded as high fashion. With works such as Lachapelle the use of morphing reality and creating whizs protest reality is more and more kosher in the world of high fashion. It is with the re-evaluation of beauty that fashion photography has enchanted and changed the world.This surmise clear be observed in the way wowork force and men dress, in their progression of outfits, daily work clothes, celebratory clothes and all of this reflected in the economic up rise of the consumers proclivity to be in fashion for the season. LaChapelle explores and exploits this need finished his photography and although not always paying attention to the status quo on what fashion photo graphy is, he presents his viewers with his own perspective on beauty through fashion. The topic of fashion has always held my interest, especially fashion photography.The way in which the photographer screw create different farmings of existence through different angles, altering materialed lenses, and outfits has been a great intrigue of my interest in art. My favorite photographer is David LaChapelle which is why I choose him for the research and analysis part of this project. The way that he does fashion photography is a reinvention of it. He does not just accomplish what no one else can accomplish in photography but he also puts humor into his pieces as will be explained later.He makes fun of fashion, or the extremes which quite a little put on fashion by creating a world through photography in which his eloquence matches this humor as can be seen in his Shoes to Die For photograph. Thus, he is a photographer I admire because he does not take himself too seriously. Introdu ction Fashion photography is approximately portability and malleability. A model can be incorporated into a fantastical environment for which only the word surreal can be used to define. In modern day photography there is a myriad of photographers each striving for a tender lens, a new way in which to limn a fantastic find out.In the history of fashion, nothing is so transc depotental than photography. The image in fashion has been primarily focused on the model and how swell the model sells the clothes it is in the photograph that mutation over the decades has skyrocketed into a true art form. Fashion photography does not succumb to the norms of portraiture that Daguerre do famous but to focal points of beauty in landscape, cityscape and how well assembled the model appears in those scenes. Body MediaWith the issue of thinness, the disease anorexia is conjured up since the advocating of the media towards a thinner muliebritys body, disorders such as anorexia and bulimia fi lm be fall predominant among women and men. In the Western culture this rising phenomenon has become a central circumstance for overly conscious people who focus on their appearance, as Dittmar and Howard state, they learn to see themselves as objects to be wait oned at and evaluated by appearance. This pressure is constantly reenforce by a strong pagan ideal of female beauty, and that ideal has become synonymous with thinness (477-478).With this notion in the forefront of the paper new(prenominal) issues such as model size as they are propagated through the media become a rising concern. Dittmar and Howard go on to state that roughly 20% of models in the fashion industry are underweight which in term clinically diagnosis them with the condition of anorexia nervosa. These conditions give further rise to other womens problems. Since the cultural idea of thinness as perpetuated by the media and the fashion industry is to have increasingly thin body types, the average wo worldly co ncern or man tries dieting and exercising to keep up with the standard.When the average woman or man finds that they are still not normal ac heaping to the cultural guidelines of the word, they begin to be dissatisfied with their bodies which leads to low self-esteem, Thus it stands to reason that women are likely to experience body dissatisfaction, low self-esteem and even eating disorders if they interiorise and strive for a beauty ideal that is stringently thin and essentially unattainable (478).The mass media is the continual hindrance to a healthy body image for Americans. The media is a social influence that reinforces these ideals through repetition and product placement. The media is a visual stimulation letting the American public voyeuristically fantasize active ultra thin models and having a body (sometimes these bodies are digitally re-mastered) that provides relative pleasure in shape.Dittmar and Howards article highlights one such concern with the UK establishment i n which they held a conference in June 2000 to discuss this issue of thinness and the media and to in essence debate about banning the use of these too thin models as media advertisement since the image essentially gave permission to the public to suffer and toil over gaining a great body, no matter the public acquired anorexia nervosa or other clinical conditions. The detriment of this fact, the fact that thinness is amounting to such problems as anorexia nervosa raise many social and cultural issues.The cultural issue may take up be summarized in Dittmar and Howards article as they quote Naomi Campbell and Claudia Schiffer, both spokespersons for top models, (s)tatistics have repeatedly shown that if you stick a beautiful skinny missy on the cover of a magazine you sell more copiesAgencies would say that we supply the women and the advertisers, our clients, want. The clients would say that hey are selling a product and responding to consumer demand. At the end of the day, it is a business and the fact is that these models sell the products (478).Thus, the opposite side of the spectrum is arguing that businesses or model clients are besides representing something that already exists within the cultural dynamic. The furrow is that thin models represent what people want to see and so the products the models are advertizing sell more copies. The clients of the modeling agencies are merely tied into the vicious cycle of believing what they want to believe. Although this point seems somewhat valid, the validation stops when such perpetuating leads to serious illnesses (in some cases anorexia or bulimia have lead to death).It can plainly be deciphered from the above text that body image is created by the media, as Guttman quotes in her article Advertising, My Mirror in an interview with Christian Blachas, That image comes to us from the fashion world. People like to say advertising starts trends like the recent wave of fashion pornography. But this came satis fying from designers and fashion journalists. The job of advertising is to pick up on trends. Its rarely subversive because brands dont gain anything from shocking people too much. Advertisings a remarkable mirror, but it doesnt start fads (25).Consequently, Blachas is stating that if fault is to be placed anywhere for the over correction of dieting, then the find fault is not on the fashion industry but on advertisers who are the ones who pick up trends and allow these trends to filter down to every consumer thus, while 20% of models are diagnosed as too thin this relevant percentage can be related to the American public. Since the blame seems to be resting with the advertisers, another close look at the media needs to be given. The media perpetuates fads and other culturally influential eras, but this seems to have heightened within the past few decades.The bombardment the public receives from the media and especially from the advertising end of the media is seen not only in comm ercials but in product placement in music videos, and movies. Magazines also aid in distributing the advertisements ideals as can be seen in repeated simulation on television soap operas, just as much as from fashion magazines, as Hargreaves and Tiggemann state in Longer term implications of responsiveness to thin-ideal support for a cumulative hypothesis of body image disturbance? , Although this evidence appears to support the medias negative extend to on body image, various methodological limitations need to be acknowledged.In particular, the causative direction of correlations between body dissatisfaction and media use remains a challenge. The causal direction is clear in controlled laboratory researchOne possible link between individual reactive episodes of dissatisfaction in response to specific media images and the education of body image is that enduring attitudes, beliefs, and feelings about bodies and appearances accumulate over time through repeated exposure to ideals of attractiveness in the media (466).Thus, the level of insecurity is well-kept in the public through the barrage of repeated body images through advertisements. In the composition of photography there are many elements which define the medium line, color, focus, brightness, scenery, shadow, etc. The evolution of fashion photography hinged upon the mass reproduction of images in magazines. In Germany, in the early 20th century, fashion became fully popular and addressable to the populace through Berliner Illustrierte Zeitung and Munchner Illustrierte Presse .It is in the magazine world that fashion photography began its popularity . As soon as fashion hit a mainstream cord with the public, magazines sales soared and thus was born the beginning of the history of fashion photography. There was great demand for magazines especially fashion. Women and men would see what to wear, how to wear to it, what was in look and the modern world finally had the leisure to pursue the market of c lothes as fashion.With this demand installed in the public, it was up to the photographers of the early fashion industry to come up with new ways in which to depict the model, the clothes and entice women and men to dress according to what was portrayed in the photos. This is where composition of the photo is indispensable to ensure new and deliberate methods of fashion portrayal. With the oncoming age of color introduced in photography in the 1930s and 1940s as the encyclopedia elaborates, Nonetheless, color remained a sidelight in photography until the 1930s because it required considerable patience and expense on the part of both photographer and printer.The dominance of color in terms of reproduction and everyday picture-taking did not begin until 1935, when Kodak started to sell Kodachrome transparency film, and was completed by the introduction of color-print films and Ektachrome films in the 1940s. With color photography, the realm of the fashion world drastically changed. T he limits of black and white and sepia toned magazine covers gave way to brilliant exhibits of color combinations, and a wide range of fabrics that women and men could now see, duplicate, or buy.Fashion photography changed from depicting high-class society women to models in every day clothing. Professional photographers were then counted on to resonant the mishap of how fashion should co-exist with society. With Vogue and Harpers Bazaar photographers were hired full time to create, in the magazine, a gallery of fabric eye candy dolled up on a model with a backdrop. June 1, 1947 Vogue cover. The most notable photographers at the time were pictorialists , Edward Steichen and Englishman Cecil Beaton. The incorporation of art into photography made the photographs more presumptive as high fashion.Steichen and Beaton glamorized the models with enhanced lighting effects, which lionized the models and made the magazine world believe that fashion through photography was otherworldly. Amo ng new techniques being used, the online encyclopedia states, American Edward Steichen and Englishman Cecil Beaton, both one-time pictorialists. These photographers began to use elaborate lighting schemes to achieve the same sort of glamorizing effects being perfected by Clarence Bull as he photographed new starlets in Hollywood, California. Martin Munkacsi initiated a fresh look in fashion photography after Harpers Bazaar hired him in 1934.He move the models outdoors, where he photographed them as active, energetic modern women. So began the movement of high fashion. Martin Munkacsi photograph. In the movement, the use of fashion as advertisement was key in develop a market for fashion photography. It is through marketing advertising, that fashion photographers began to be highlighted, as the encyclopedia states, The new approach to photography in the editorial matter of magazines was matched by an increasingly sophisticated use of photography in advertisements.Steichen, while a lso working for Vogue and Vanity Fair magazines, became one of the highest-paid photographers of the 1930s through his work for the J. Walter Thompson advertising agency. These photographers, as well as others, helped to make advertising an art form through use of portraying models hands in product placement, and altogether catering to ever-widening audience of magazine buyers. Fashion photography changed through the utilization and realization that product sold only through its modeling and photographic depiction.