[Discussion] CFP: Fashion as Photograph: A Collection of Critical Essays and Commentaries on Fashion Photography (3/31/05; collection)

[Sule Tarakcioglu]

Fashion as Photograph =AD call for papers

A collection of critical essays and commentaries on fashion photography.

Critical interest in fashion has grown in recent years, with scholars
and critics in a variety of fields engaging fashion as a culturally and
historically significant phenomenon, examining it in relation to art,
mass culture, spectacle and self-identity, consumption, performance,
politics, and lifestyle.

Images constitute the driving force behind the fashion system. Fashion
images circulate freely as commodities; they have a far greater reach
than the garments themselves, and considerable influence in defining
fashion and the fashionable. For a mass audience, it is largely by means
of photographs=AD rather than actual designer clothes =AD that fashion is
produced and consumed.

Some of the most innovative photographic work in recent years has
originatedithin the domain of fashion, and fashion photography has begun
to command a growing amount of space in museums, galleries, and auction
houses. Engaging with new technologies and new ideals of beauty, today=B9=
s
fashion photography is politically and aesthetically provocative and
ideologically potent.

However, there is still little discursive space devoted specifically to
the discussion of fashion photography. Fashion as Photograph will map
out the boundaries of this discourse, drawing together the emergent body
of critical writing, and opening up a space for the development of new
ways of understanding and thinking about fashion photography.

The editors seek contributions from scholars, critics, curators, and
collectors, as well as those working within the fashion photography
industry: publishers, editors, advertisers, designers, art directors,
stylists, models, and photographers.

The collection comprises several linked objectives, and submissions are
encouraged (but not restricted) to essays and commentaries which address
any or all of the following concerns:

- to bring some of the concerns of current photographic criticism to
bear upon fashion photography. Recent photographic criticism has moved
away from the semiotic model, and explored approaches such as
phenomenology, aesthetics, and cultural politics. For this reason, the
editors are less interested in papers which offer simple semiotic
readings of fashion images.

- to examine the production of contemporary and historical fashion
images, and the complex processes, (aesthetic, social, and political) by
which they come into being. The fashion image that the reader sees on
the page is the product of a complex network of power relations, and not
simply a matter of which frock looks best with which shoes.

- to examine the consumption or =8Cuse=B9 of fashion photographs as cultu=
ral
objects. Photographs are not simply images, but material objects, and
fashion images can appear in a number of different contexts: magazine
spread, postcard, billboard, art print, or video clip. The materiality
of the fashion image, in other words, is vital to its presence and
action as a social agent.

- the recent history of fashion imagery.

- all of these concerns necessarily imply an engagement with the broader
notion of image, and the part played by the fashion photograph in the
construction of image on individual, corporate, and social planes.


Please submit 500-750 word abstracts (for completed papers of a maximum
of 5000 words) by March 31, 2005. Please include your name, affiliation,
and a brief cv or bio; please do not include images at this stage.

Abstracts may be submitted by e-mail (rtf format) to shinkle@wmin.ac.uk
or by regular post to
Dr. Eug=E9nie Shinkle
Department of Design, Digital Media, and Photography
School of Media, Arts, and Design
University of Westminster
Northwick Park, Watford Road
Harrow HA1 3TP
UK



 From the Literary Calls for Papers Mailing List