Enhanced descriptions from Syndetics:

Photographic images are a driving force behind the fashion system, and they play a key role in defining global fashion culture. Fashion photography is attracting increasing public attention; it has embraced new image-making technologies, and has shown itself to be a commercially and ideologically powerful medium.This rich and rewarding book combines new critical approaches with views from inside the industry, showing fashion photography to be a complex cultural phenomenon worthy of serious critical attention. It brings together distinguished contributors from the UK, North America, Australia and Europe - including Rankin, Philippe Garner, Penny Martin, Caroline Evans, Eva Respini and Margaret Maynard - to examine the production and consumption of fashion images from the points of view of industry and academia, the museum, the auction house, and the art gallery. Illustrated in black and white and colour, the book discusses key issues in recent fashion photography and establishes a fertile space for new ways of looking to emerge on this dynamic visual form.

Table of contents provided by Syndetics

• Image and Identity
• A Shop of Images and Signs
• The Elegance of the Everyday: Nobodies in Contemporary Fashion Photography
• Models, Agents & Clients: Race, Nation and the Limits of Passing in Fashion Photography
• Stardom and Fashion: on the Representation of Movie Stars and their Fashion(able) Image in Magazines and Advertising Campaigns
• Fashion Photographs as Commodities
• Fashioning Fiction in Photography Since 1990
• Fashioning the Street: Images of the Street in the Fashion Media
• The Fashion Image from Magazine Page to Gallery Wall
• Process and Politics
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• Interview with Rankin
• Interview with Penny Martin
• Simultaneity: Photographer and Model in the Pages of Inter-War Vogue
• Critical Frameworks
• The Fashion Photograph: An Ecology
• The Synthetic Ideal: the Fashion Model in the Age of Digital Manipulation
• The Line Between the Wall and the Floor: Negative Affect in Contemporary Fashion Photography
• Sex, Sameness, and Desire: Thoughts on Versace and the Clone
• Notes
• Bibliography
• Index

Reviews provided by Syndetics

CHOICE Review

This collection of 15 essays examines the production and consumption of fashion images and their impact on fashion culture worldwide. As ubiquitous as media-generated fashion pictures are, little critical attention has been paid to this visual genre. The editor attributes this in part to the perception that such images are incapable of being critical about the world they represent and promote. The book consists of 15 articles in four parts. Part 1, "Critical Contexts," looks at the institutions and ideologies behind fashion imagery. Next, "Processes and Politics" examines the business of creating fashion images and covers, e.g., Sascha Behrendt's article on the interaction of commercial, creative, and political factors that contribute to fashion imagery. "Image and Identity" includes essays such as S. N. Sadre-Orafai's, which examines factors used to classify models into racial and ethnic "types." The final section, "Reassessing the Real," discusses the tenuous claim of the fashion photograph as document. The essays are convincing and altogether make a strong case for continued scholarly work in the area of fashion images and advertising. The 19 figures and 19 plates (most in color) are well chosen and strengthen the accompanying essays. Summing Up: Recommended. Upper-level undergraduates and above; general readers. C. Baker Baylor University