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arndom
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About fahsion photography (old art. one)
Monaco's Grand Prix of Flesh and Fashion
By Suzy Menkes International Herald Tribune
Tuesday, December 22, 1992
The blush-pink buildings of this toy-town city seem to have taken on a rosier glow. Is it the bright winter sunshine? The red carpet on the sidewalks and the Santa-with-sleigh fairy-lights? The thought of Princess Stéphanie giving birth to love-child Louis by her bodyguard? The sight of Crown Prince Albert on the Sporting Club dance floor with supermodel Claudia Schiffer?
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Or could it be the exhibition of fashion photographs in which clothes feature less - far less - than bared flesh?.
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The fourth International Festival of Fashion Photography generated a gala and a high-powered attendance from Helmut Newton through Karl Lagerfeld - and a debate.
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"Is fashion photography out of fashion?" was the question posed in a discussion that got to the heart of the subject matter hanging on the walls of the Sporting Club: Can fashion photographers give themselves that title if they dispense with clothes?
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"Yes," said French photographer Dominique Isserman, 45, known for tender images of women."Photographs of nudes are part of fashion, because if you take a picture of 1910 and compare it with a modern picture, as well as the differences of body or makeup, there is an attitude that reflects the time."
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"No," said Helmut Newton, whose fashion images have a powerful sexual charge. "It's dishonest if you don't photograph fashion." He walked out of the debate in which Vivienne Westwood (wearing silver earrings with the letters "SEX") dismissed fashion photography as "a very limited form of expression compared to painting."
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"Creativity comes from technique," she said. "It is based on lighting and composition. There is a constant battle between the classic approach and a romantic one. It needs the input of both. But a romantic attitude often leads to an overflow of self-indulgence.
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The exhibition is designed to showcase both the industry's leading figures and developing talent. Although it is open to the public (until Jan. 4), it is really a show for the pros, who look for work at fashion's cutting edge and for changes barely yet in focus.
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The show is about images of women, and they show slight, pale-faced figures in dark shrouds, transparent wraps, sex-shop accessories - or just nothing at all. At best, the pictures, which are a mirror of avant-garde fashion, have a tender poetry. Some are disturbing in that they suggest women as victims. All the photographs were in surreal contrast to the plump Monaco matrons in sturdy suits and the ritzy, fur-coated Italians out shopping for the holiday season.
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In exchanging the powerful woman of the 1980s for the fragile image of the 1990s, new wave photographers have dispensed with sensuous supermodels - even if Naomi Campbell (in a flutter of chiffon dress by Azzedine Alaïa) was co-presenter at the awards ceremony.
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The prize for young talent went to the 27 year-old British photographer Corinne Day, who first used the waif-like model Kate Moss - now high fashion's hot property. Day showed an arresting image of Moss with breasts barely veiled in a wispy blouse.
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Juergen Teller, a 28-year old German who was the 1991 new talent winner, showed New Age travelers - figures set in a patchy wasteland. His work for the designer Katherine Hamnett proved that it is possible, in spite of claims at the debate, to be avant-garde and yet show the clothes.
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"I don't believe that fashion photography is dead - it will always live," said German photographer Ellen Von Unwerth, 38, whose stylish, self-possessed women in exotic locations won the snapshot award.
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A feel for the ethnic is a current force in fashion photography, whether native culture is a backcloth for western clothes, or celebrated for itself. The beauty category was won by Mikael Jansson, 30, of Sweden. His tattooed decoration above bared breasts expresses a fascination with the tribal. A photograph of a ring on a wrinkled finger and a flowered necklet against a resigned face won the accessories category for the American Kurt Markus. Neither winner would be recognized by the general public as creating valid fashion images.
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HANNES Schmid of Switzerland made an impassioned plea for photographers to reflect social and political issues. He showed fashion with portraits of American Indian life.
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"But we are just contract photographers," said the Italian, Paolo Roversi, who won the Monaco grand prize. His images of a sinuous figure, head back, cigarette clamped between carmine-red lips, or a woman with rising bosom and spreading hat, are the development of Roversi's prophetic 1980s images of the new woman who was to break out of the chrysalis of her power suit. Gentle, reflective nudes form the centerpiece of the area devoted to Roversi's work.
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Many other nudes are hard-edged. Some are witty, like Sante d'Orazio's woman, naked but for high heels, on an alfresco dining table. Others are disturbing: Jean-François Lepage's collages of bodies mutilated by cutouts or staple marks.
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Helmut Newton sees nothing so new or so shocking about sexually charged imagery. "I've always gone after the glorification of women, but politically I'm a feminist," he said at the gala that he attended with his wife, June - known professionally as photographer Alice Springs.
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The fun of the evening was provided by Canon, which was showing off its newly launched Ion still video camera, which can project images immediately onto a screen. A rogue's gallery of portraits was flashed up and later laser-printed.
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Personalities are a powerful part of the fashion scene, as was shown by another exhibition at the Hôtel de Paris. The American photographer Roxanne Lowit celebrated the publication of her book, "Moments," with giant blow-ups of the 1980s fashion crowd.
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"They fix an era when everyone was living at night, they were sure it was magic and they thought they would last forever," she said of images that included Salvador Dalí (all twirling mustache and kiss curls), a Valkyrie-style Princess Gloria Thurn und Taxis, the artists David Hockney and Keith Haring, the designers Yves Saint Laurent and Karl Lagerfeld, the late Halston, Antonio Lopez, Warhol and Nureyev partying until they dropped.
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Why was there so much angst at this celebration of fashion photography? The loss of confidence expressed at the debate is part of a general fin-de-siècle fashion malaise and a hangover from the exuberant 1980s. A new generation also feels that everything has already been done.
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Peter Lindbergh, whose graphic black and white images were a standout in the show, dismisses this theory.
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"It was always felt that everything had already been done - certainly when I started 15 years ago after [Richard] Avedon and [Irving] Penn," he said. "It's a long road . And it was always three out of 1,000 who made it."
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Ultimately, the exhibition proved what everyone knows: A good photograph has the power to impress an image on the imagination and to capture in that frozen moment the spirit of the age. If some of those images are harsh and disturbing - well, so is the world outside the confident prosperity and manicured luxury of Monte Carlo.
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