Fashioning Fiction in Photography Since 1990

Since the late 1980s, the field of fashion photography has exploded, moving away from presenting a desirable ideal to showing contemporary lifestyles. An intriguing exchange of ideas and techniques between commercial photography and art photography and, more specifically, between fashion and art photography has completely changed the idea of what a fashion photograph is and what it should look like. The focus is on defining a milieu rather than just clothing. Fashioning Fiction in Photography Since 1990 presents a selection of high-profile fashion photographs influenced by two aesthetic strategies: cinema and the amateur photograph. The cinematic image, through its attention to drama and its reverence for tension and voyeurism, seduces a young audience whose primary visual points of reference are film and television. The amateur photograph, including the family album picture, provides seemingly offhand documentation of the activities of friends and associates in the lives of photographers, blurring the line between pictures made for hire and those made as personal keepsakes. This groundbreaking book, and the exhibition it accompanies, includes lavish illustrations of the work by photographers such as Philip-Lorca diCorcia, Cedric Buchet, Glen Luchford, Tina Barney, Juergen Teller, Nan Goldin and Larry Sultan, among others. The principal essay, by Susan Kismaric, Curator, and Eva Respini, Assistant Curator, in the Department of Photography at The Museum of Modern Art, explores the nature of fashion photography in the last decade, and the work of the photographers presented in this volume. A second essay, by Dennis Freedman, Vice Chairman and Creative Director of w magazine, discusses the subject from within the fashion industry and provides an intimate view of the creation of the promotional campaigns and the imagery of fashion.