taking fashion photography back

About a month ago now there was a post on one of the fashion blogs in my reader that has been stuck in my craw ever since: Read the post here

Excerpt:

Without getting too much into it at the moment, it's an example of a movement that is taking place, right now behind closed doors, by photographers who believe that fashion photography has lost its origin, and has become too commercialized, and too amateures. And they want to take things back, and at the same time dig deeper into their ability to create non tainted work.

Ehh? I'm pretty cynical about the fashion industry since I consume a lot of its imagery and know a fair amount of its hierarchies and yada yada yada. I have a pretty official stance on fashion photography, and it's basically that I want to make it as democratic as possible. I know that some of my ideas vis a vis fashion photos make no sense in terms of business. Okay, fashion on the grand scale is for all people. Everybody wears clothes. How much you buy into certain aesthetics or the luxury aspect of it depends on how much money you have and whether you really give a shit. I mean yeah, there are people out there who wear their t-shirt from the company picnic and their holy cargo shorts and their crocs and pretty much don't care ever, period. I offer no judgment on that. What I'm saying is: because class exists, because there are wealthy people and poor people, there is going to be wealthy fashion and poor fashion. This will result in the really high end luxury fashions and goods being photographed by people who are paid a lot for images that are put in magazines that hawk expensive goods; magazines that are expensive to make. But even knowing all that, I don't buy it. I don't want fashion to be about the luxury goods--I mean, certain articles of clothing can be well made and cost more--but the whole super star designer ball game we've got going on, where designers sign their name to shoes that cost 50 dollars to make and then price them at 5000--this shit does not sit well with me, whether or not it's a fact of life.

Okay, I'm not really looking to take down the entire fashion industry in this post. Obviously I set the scale really high here.

The idea of a fashion movement that wants to take fashion photography "back" makes me nervous. First of all, how does one even take things back to the time before fashion photog was "too commercialized and "amateures"? When was that glorious time in fashion photography history? The 90s? The 80s? Helmut Lang? If you get rid of amateurs in fashion photography, what are we left with? The elitist hierarchy that shoves Lagerfeld and only Lagerfeld down our throats? The kind of photography that demands that women's bodies only look a certain way?

On the other hand, the commercialization of fashion photography (which I'm assuming just means photoshop): now there's something I would like to revolutionize. I want to see real bodies in real contexts wearing these clothes. I want the fantasy but I also want the fantasy to be democratic; i.e. let's stop pitting rich white women as the ultimate goal and let all kinds of bodies participate in the luxury of interesting clothes. And let's get rid of the computer programs that make their skin look like plastic. Let's get rid of that everlasting temptation to remove just a couple inches off the waist, digitally. Or physically, that too.

So I don't know. I hope that this revolution from this blog post, this group of people behind closed doors: I hope they know what they're doing. I hope they do something fantastic and interesting. I hope they use all kinds of models. I hope that their revolution also actually matters, because it would be nice to see something out of the confines of the Vogue monarchy.

But "taking back fashion photography" is entirely missing the point. By all means, change its course. Just don't romanticize the past and miss the forest for the trees.