Fashion’s main purpose is that of creating a parallel world to the one we inhabit, a sort of fictitious universe or dimension made out of strong, powerful and evocative fantasies and desires.
This is why having a fervid imagination, a bright and bold vision and a sharp mind definitely help if you want to work in this industry.
In the last few years, though, there has been a tendency to focus only on the more visual aspects of fashion, with extremely beautiful photo shoots featuring glamorous and perfect models with amazing looks.
Digital photography and photo retouching programmes definitely helped creating daring editorials published in various magazines.
Yet, while hitting the retina, such beautiful images often didn’t hit any special chords in the readers' hearts.
The problem with the carefully studied beauty of such images is that it often leaves you cold and doesn’t seem to be able to transmit any kind of passion or inspire any powerful story that goes beyond the beautiful clothes and accessories portrayed.
I’ve recently been going through some images taken in the ‘60s by famous fashion photographers for a personal research and I stopped for a while to ponder on three images by Jeanloup Sieff.
The images in question are part of an iconic photo shoot taken in 1962 and published in the January 1963 issue of Harper’s Bazaar and feature Alfred Hitchcock ironically posing around the legendary Psycho house with model Ina Balke.
Despite his pledge to superficiality and frivolousness, French photographer Sieff had actually a special talent for going beyond the most obvious and superficial things.
Born in Paris to parents of Polish origin, Sieff started taking the first pictures as a teenager, in 1947, abandoning his passion for cinema, first attending the Vaugirard School of Photography in Paris and then moving to the Vevey School in Switzerland. He became a freelance reporter, and, in 1958, joined the Magnum Agency.
In the mid 50s he also started working for various magazines, including Esquire, Vogue and Harper's Bazaar, and moved to New York in 1961, returning to Paris five years after.
Sieff’s fashion shoots were particularly beautiful since the models featured had a life of their own, they weren’t just beautiful women in elegant clothes, but they were iconic protagonists of sensual and intriguing stories in shades of black and white.
Sieff also took unusual portraits of writers, actors and actresses and became more famous for his images of dancers and nudes.
The former had a special intensity about them since Sieff always managed to capture dancers in different stages of preparations while pursuing perfection: there is a photograph of a young boy in a Shanghai ballet school taken in 1987 that may easily inspire an entire novel for the piercing look the young dancer has in his eyes.
Far from being vulgar, Sieff’s nudes retained instead a special modern elegance thanks to the chiaroscuro effects the photographer employed in his studies of the female body.
What fascinates me about the three Hitchcock images is the style, the irony and the story behind them.
The photographs – taken with a Leica M3 camera mounted with a 21mm Super Angulon – are based on contrasts: the photographer and his subjects played with mystery and irony, fear and style, perfection and clumsiness (see the hand holding the sculpture of a bird appearing in a corner like a misplaced prop).
These unexpected combinations allowed the main characters to tell a story, inhabiting with their fiction a fashion fiction and turning the shoot into something memorable with a famous director playing a game that never reappeared in any modern magazines (can you think of another director featured in a fashion photo shoot that became so iconic?).
Scary but fun these images still evoke a parallel universe generated out of paradoxes and definitely show you there is something missing in the images relentlessly appearing in contemporary magazines.
A final note for fans of fashion photography: Jeanloup Sieff’s daughter, Sonia, has definitely inherited her father’s talent for images, but also some Hitchcockian irony. After shooting last year the campaign for the Juliette Has a Gun perfume featuring Lou Doillon, Sonia Sieff also shot a while back an advert for a fictitious fragrance called “Orgy” (featuring Lou Doillon, Caroline de Maigret, Misia Navarro and Jeremy Barrois), complete of chicken eating scene evoking Hitchock's trailer for The Birds.
Add to Technorati Favorites
Lijit Search
Comments