Photo Fiction
By Zhanna Veyts
Curated by Susan Kismaric and Eva Respini, the show mixes the works of 13 artists and fashion photographers in an absurd carnival of pretense. It is staged for the sophisticated 21st century viewer who is familiar with the representational vocabularies of film, television, music video, and well-versed in the lexicon of image media. The works selected show the commercial strategy of advertisers as moving from product-centered images to more complex tableaus of lifestyles maintained with their products in tow. The artists’ campaigns read like storyboards for lives of drama and pleasure, with consumption conspicuous yet peripheral.
Take for instance the Larry Sultan series for Kate Spade’s campaign titled, "Visiting Tennessee." Clearly drawing on the schematic familiarity of family vacation snapshots, the pictures confuse intimacy with clich� but naturalize the product into the tableu-vivant of a holiday in New York. Bright lighting, sharp tonal contrast and the surprised smiles of awed sightseers give these pictures a timeless "Kodak moment" visual quality.
Steve Meisel’s "The Good Life" project for Vogue Italia draws on a similar vocabulary of 1950’s families gleefully engaged. His snapshots evoke family dinner conversations and the soapy ruckus of kids washing the family car, but are eerily lit giving an unsettling tension and plasticity. The unnerving juxtapositions of platinum blond children with unnaturally young fathers cause the images to unravel out of reality and any of its accompanying narratives. Instead, the superficiality stagnates the dynamism of the frame and holds the viewer accountable for determining the outcome.
If the snapshot-based ads don’t confuse the viewer about why they might ever want to enter the advertiser’s world, certainly the cinematographic images will raise a few questions. Positing mystery and malice, Prada’s campaign by Glen Luchford and Philip-Lorca Dicorcia’s works, "Cuba Libre" for W Magazine both draw on film noir tradition and its suspenseful allusions to grime and danger. Theses constructed narratives speak of charged moments in the plot when a character is caught in a moment of self-repose while the viewer is already aware of the eminent threat lurking in the shadow. If this sounds like a visual clich� contrived from the film stills of Cindy Sherman, it is because there is not only a direct link but supplementary commentary as well. The idea of fashion models and accessories evoking personal danger may be questionable, but the photographer’s stylized light scheme and cropping, combined with a charged perspectival distance evoke a metanarrative that transgresses fashion altogether. The viewer finds the images perplexing to look at, but cannot look away without gaining some further (yet unavailable) understanding of the scene.
The thematic developments within the images are careful constructions of the artist, which blend high and low culture in visual plotlines and recognizable impressions to update earlier conventions of commercial distribution and marketing. As the curators suggested in the show catalogue, "ads sell lifestyles with images where garments function as props." But while the images are seemingly successful at suggesting narrative individually and as series, the show as a whole turns out as an indecisive and incoherent choice of works. It is selective, yet unrepresentative, unable to either show a precedent nor set one. Filtering out complications such as the fashion designer as artist, a la Alexander McQueen, or the artist as photographer, the show opts instead to focus on the questionable propositions of fictions and fashion photography. What becomes increasingly clear is that these artists opt to maintain their faith in the image’s ability to illustrate (life)style rather than succumb to the fiction of its capacity to generate one.
