Selling The Unreal

One of the first iconic images of fashion photography was published in the American Vogue as a sideshow to a minor story on how women could wear an untied-hair look at the beach. It wasn’t a bad display for Vogue of the late 1980s. The magazine at that time was content with overlit images of expressionless models in elaborate dresses, usually shot indoors, in colour. They were fashion as haute: out of reach for most of its readers, embodying a kind of insular aspiration. These images sent the message that high fashion was an unattainable ideal, more suited to a magazine cover than a cocktail party. The beach photo was nothing like that.  

A monochrome image of six women dressed in oversized white shirts, their hair down, laughing, with barely a hint of make-up and, in that moment, unmindful of the camera. Just a photo of young women at the beach, armed with a sense of humour and ready to take on life. Shot on California’s Santa Monica Beach in 1988 by the legendary Peter Lindbergh, it featured Tatjana Patitz, Linda Evangelista, Christy Turlington, Karen Alexander, Rachel Williams and Estelle Hallyday—the supermodels that defined a generation. In Lindbergh’s retelling of the making of the image, there was no mood board, no look, no theme, and no elaborate outfits (“Just put them in white shirts”). It was shot on film—no cable connected the camera to a computer, no frame-by-frame analysis of the images on location. In short, it looked real, even though the gathering of six supermodels wearing white shirts on a public beach is an event that requires a special alignment of the stars.

Fashion photography, an adjunct of fine art photography, has always struggled with its link to reality—in itself a contested construct in the postmodern, hypermediated world. One of its central and enduring disquiets has been its existential entanglement with commerce. Fashion exists to sell dresses; it has struggled to sell stories alongside. There are many stories to tell, however, starting from the designer’s vision for the dress, the photographer’s interpretation of that vision, the models that represent it, and the location that adds to it. Fashion can capture the zeitgeist or strive to create one. 

Lindbergh, who had a huge impact on modern fashion photography, often spoke about the untouched quality of his photos, the near absence of processing, and the secondary place of outfits in his work. What he didn’t speak about often was how cultivated the look was, how carefully the models were styled, and how much practice went into creating the spontaneity that was the hallmark of his style. 

Lindbergh may have helped rescue the fashion photograph in the 1980s, but the genre’s tryst with realism is older. The true pioneer of modern fashion photography is the Hungarian Martin Munkacsi, who used his background in sport and war photography to produce masterly fashion editorials over three decades starting from the 1930s. His 1933 Harper’s Bazaar photo of society model Lucile Brokaw dressed in a black cape and running down the beach, a part of her a blur, was the first fashion photo to show movement. Munkacsi’s photos of Katherine Hepburn with her family are outdoor shots of rare intimacy. His photo of Fred Astaire mid-step, full smile, is one for the ages. Munkacsi’s photo of three black children running to the sea inspired the French master Henri Cartier-Bresson to realise that “photography could reach eternity through the moment”.  

Italian photographer Frank Horvat brought his experience in photojournalism to fashion photography with tremendous results. His series on India and Pakistan, his various shoots of the unflattering Paris of the 1950s, and his documentary on the strippers of New Orleans are works of great reportage, and it was these photos that he credited for the uniqueness of his fashion work. He insisted on taking models to a variety of locations, from seedy bars in Paris to the streets of Rome, creating photos while life played on all around them. His 1967 cover photo for Harper’s Bazaar (‘woman in a parasol’), a sharp silhouette of a woman under a colourful umbrella in Paris, was the result of an assistant not firing the light—the kind of “little miracle” he was always in search of.

In the 1960s and 1970s, the French photographer Guy Bourdin brought surrealism to fashion editorials. Whether it was through creating sets or using locations, his work had complex stories to tell. Published in the French edition of Vogue, his images in bold colours were often laid out as double spreads with the subjects in the centre, occupying parts of both pages and disappearing in the gutter in between. The layout was as much a part of the story. His lingerie shoot for a department store influenced American photographer and writer Nan Goldin, whose signature style is part personal history, part unfeigned closeness to her subjects. Her work, which often looks at the lives of marginalised communities, inspired a new kind of intimate realism in fashion photography.

In India, fashion photography started with shoots of maharajas in their finery, a derivative of the paintings that preceded the camera. For a long time, Indian fashion editorials worked on similar lines, giving primacy to dress and jewellery. They were often aimed at old money—the use of regalia rooted in the past, a gentle reminder of lost privilege—while also courting a new class of the prosperous. The last two decades have seen an attempt at complex narratives that were absent earlier. A new generation of photographers, from far corners of the country, have brought their identities and stories to the fore. 

Designer Masaba Gupta’s 2018 festive collection was shot inside a grungy room that had all the marks of a government office—stains, disinterested officials, pithy signboards and poor lighting. Gupta’s bride-at-the-marriage-registry look, shot by Ishaan Nair, is a new and confident kind of realism in Indian fashion photography. Surefooted women, dressed in fine clothes, a little bored, a little out of place; the shoot had just the right amount of whimsy. 

A more recent and much overused trope is India as a land of contrasts. Vogue India’s August 2008 issue featured ordinary Indians identified only as “man” and “woman”, holding objects of luxury like a Birkin bag, a Fendi bib and a Burberry umbrella. It was tone-deaf and offensive, matched only by American Vogue’s recent shoot of Olena Zelenska, Ukraine’s first lady, posing in designer clothes with soldiers as props. The works of photographers like Ashish Shah are a welcome change from these juxtaposition-heavy images. His shoots for Raw Mango appear to be a genuine quest for an Indian identity, borrowing from the past while creating moody modern stories. 

Around the world, there has been a movement for more realism in fashion photography, driven in part by the changing rules of commerce. A fashion editorial now has to compete with selfies, influencers, Instagram and TikTok. The growing demand for more representation for different ethnic groups, body types and sexualities is also forcing fashion photography to recalibrate its moral compass.  

While the nature of reality in fashion photography may be malleable, sometimes the truth of its subject is too real to be airbrushed. Days after her retirement last September, tennis star Serena Williams opened the New York Fashion Week. Wearing a custom Balenciaga silver-metal gown and cape, the champion walked the runway to her own voiceover from an earlier interview, speaking of wanting to be remembered as “a girl who changed tennis or was just able to bring something new to the game”. Williams was accompanied on the ramp by four girls in tennis outfits holding rackets. On the runway, she was joined by supermodels like Gigi and Bella Hadid, Kendall Jenner, Emily Ratajkowski and Irina Shayk, but she towered over them all. In the audience were Kanye West, Kourtney Kardashian and Travis Barker, Keke Palmer, Doja Cat, Jared Leto and Anna Wintour. To be real, the photos of that night only needed the truth of Serena Williams.