The title of this post is a quote from the 70's from Susan Sontag's collection of essays entitled On Photography. "Today everything exists to end in a photograph", she wrote. And 40 years later, this is truer than ever. But sadly, we live in a world so saturated with imagery that it seems like we don't stop to pay attention to photos anymore. We are numbed by images and sometimes we just take them for granted. Has photography lost its power as a visual language?
Last weekend I went to the Vogue Festival 2016 and had the opportunity to attend Vogue America's Creative Director Jamie Perlman's talk on fashion photography today. During the talk she addressed the sameness that we see in fashion photography nowadays where everyone seems to get inspired by each other (or copy each other) resulting on imagery that has lost its edge and its appeal.
According to her, and this is something that I strongly agree with, the challenge in fashion photography today is breaking away from the feeling of perfection and cleanliness that has dominated the medium these last few years and going back to more raw and natural looking images. She praised photographers who have gone back to film because of it's distinctive and less polished aesthetics.
It feels like today more than ever we as creatives working in the fashion industry should focus on developing our own style rather than trying to copy someone else's just because they are getting all the work and we are not. There is a clear shift in the industry and only those who produce work that stands out from the rest will stay in business.
Photo credit: Matt Dowling from The Freelancer Club (left) and I having a chat during one of the club's masterclasses.
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