Fashion photography is pornography for connoisseurs. When the other boys were outside playing baseball, I was out there playing baseball. When the other boys were outside playing football, I was out there playing football. But when the other boys were inside panting over Playboy, I was inside panting over Vogue. I guess quantitative secondary sexual characteristics were not my bag. It was beauty that made me hot.
Not just the graven image of beauty. I was interested in the real thing and pursued it. But still the image was always there, promising more than what was evident in daily life—not the impossible, but the heroically imaginable. The most beautiful women in the world. Not au naturel but au artificiel. They might be naked, or nearly so, but they were made up, styled, and accessorized to the hilt. This beauty wasn’t a simple matter of natural biological attraction. This beauty wasn’t a matter of nature. It was art improving on the best nature had to offer. It was art in the service of evolution (or vice versa).
Pornography is often defined as that which appeals to prurient interests, but prurient interests are entirely natural, and most prurience could be seen as being in the service of the survival of the fittest. Fashion photography is entirely prurient in intention. It serves to create an itch, in some cases an itch that can be scratched only through fashion consumption.
Fashion photography (like cheesecake photography) is a two-edged sword. It creates a target for evolution. A mechanism for the process of divinity. Photographic evidence of the possibility of Olympus. It creates visions that its audiences embody—through clothing, cosmetics, hairstyling, surgery, and postnatural selection. It creates objective standards of desirability by which men’s (and women’s) sexual behavior is governed. Men don’t settle for less, women want more.
This beauty isn’t a matter of nature, it is art improving on the best nature has to offer. It is art in the service of evolution
But sexually stimulating photography does much more than create an aesthetic program for lust and reproduction theory. It also creates decoys for sperm, each image-generated climax is one less potential fetus for heaven to worry about. Each playmate is a prophylactic muse. Cindy Crawford surpasses Helen of Troy, being a face (and a body) that launched a billion sperm. Models moby the dicks of the mass of men.
Modern musehood is in direct proportion to quantity of image reproduction. Advertisers know that big models sell product. That’s why there are so few top models and so many beautiful women waiting tables. It’s not that Linda and Christy and Paulina are that much more beautiful than all the other girls. It’s not that they possess, say, one-third of the collective female beauty in the world. It’s just that they possess one-third of the good gigs. And that’s because they have the power that comes from recognition. They have reinforced images that carry the echo of all the images that have been published before. They have real, perceptible auras of success and supersexuality. They also have stories, legends. We know them. I saw two black girls about twelve years old in a magazine shop. One pointed to a cover and said, “That’s Cindy Crawford. She’s the most beautiful girl in the world.”
In the age of reproduction, models are the muses. It is the big model who inspires the mass of women who inspire the mass of men. How many men have slept with Christie Brinkley or Cheryl Tiegs in a way? Not just in fantasy, or in a nocturnal succubus visitation, but in a kind of actual, psychic transference. There is something of the model in her female audience. She gives her look to the masses, so the masses own portions of her soul. Photography might steal the soul, but reproduction amplifies it.
Several of the very top models in New York live in the Police Building. Does that have any resonance? Is beauty a kind of police force? Is there an official beauty code? Is there such a thing as designer genes?
Fashion photography, with its trite poses, unbelievable situations, and transparent intentions, is an awesome and transcendent power
Poses are the asanas and mudras of an esoteric yoga. Fashion magazine poses may often seem corny. The way she stands with legs posed just so. Maybe she was taught that way at the Wilfred Academy. Or maybe she learned it from studying fashion magazines. Or maybe by now it’s coded in her DNA.
These poses, like the pictures of yoga, draw electromagnetic power from the collective consciousness reserves. They help the body achieve a favorable polarity.
Occasionally a great model will come along who invents a style of posing—say a Twiggy or a Veruschka or a Marilyn Monroe or a Betty Page—and that style will be adopted into the repertoire that constitutes the discipline. And that’s the genesis of voguing, the trysexual dance ritual of seeing the world as a runway.
According to theosophists, glamour is one manifestation of maya, or illusion, and what we see is what we don’t get. The ritual pose can be seen as an archetypal manifestation of glamour/maya, or it can be seen as a ritualized recognition of illusion that transcends it, a sort of yoga that is more than skin-deep. Think of it as Voga.
The prototype existential hero of the sixties was the fashion photographer played by David Hemmings in Antonioni’s BlowUp, whose camera is a penis substitute. And maybe vice versa. In shooting Veruschka he takes her to a climax that is achieved simply by posing. This photographer was a surly sort of seeker, an unconscious magician driven by quest for an answer when he didn’t even know the question.
Blow-Up was just a movie. But it reflected and focused on a certain truth, and then amplified and projected that image until it became a reality. Today fashion photographers are not simple thralls of the rag trade. They do “their own work.” They have shows in art galleries and museums. They are artists. Well, some are. You know who they are.
But the ability to be an artist without being able to draw or to formulate impenetrable webs of concept isn’t the only thing that lures people into the profession. For one thing, fashion photographers are also in a great position to get to know, date, and possibly marry the most notoriously beautiful women of their times.
Heterosexual fashion photographers, like the hairdresser played by Warren Beatty in Shampoo, are in the perfect position to score the most desirable babes. Not only do they encounter them in their work, they transform the women in their work. They make them even more beautiful and desirable.
Who is the master and who is the slave in such a relationship?
Is he a transforming Svengali, a couture Henry Higgins? Or is she sometimes an insect queen whose mate is entirely disposable? Is he a tool, an image attendant, or at best a photo-Boswell to her physical genius?
There are certainly examples of brilliance in all these categories. Is consorting with the living muses of one’s time life as art? And what if a living person is the medium an artist works in? Not just pigment and emulsion but flesh and blood.
According to Bullfinch’s Mythology, “Pygmalion saw so much to blame in women that he came at last to abhor the sex, and resolved to live unmarried. He was a sculptor and had made with wonderful skill a statue of ivory, so beautiful that no living woman can be anywhere near it.” That was before photography.
A considerable number of distinguished fashion photographers are homosexual. And among them, perhaps, are cases in which the term invert can be applied with a certain accuracy, where the photographer creates a model who looks as he himself might look, a photographic negative of himself, his anima illustrated. He is a sort of Pygmalion. Not only correcting the faults of woman, but correcting his own, creating a hybrid creature of himself and his subject.
Is fashion photography narcissistic?
It does reflect the popular idea of narcissism, self-absorption, to a certain extent. But this is usually found in fashion photography that looks old, dated, or tacky. Great fashion photography represents classical narcissism.
In the Greek myth, Narcissus was not into himself. Not consciously. He mistook his own reflection for another. He died pining away for the untouchable beauty. But Narcissus was not a model or a photographer. He was a simple country lad. He didn’t have a closetful of clothes, wigs, makeup, or the best hairdressers, stylists, and photographers with which to discover that his reflection was himself in fact, no matter how artfully disguised.
Modern classical fashion photography is intensive study of a face, an image, in all its possible alterations. And rather than mistaking herself for another, the great model realizes herself through her costume changes and through the creation of her portrait by many photographers, each with his own vision of her. By altering every incidental attribute constantly, one isolates the essence and makes it more visible. The other, the reflection, is free to lead various lives, while the essence, the original, prospers from the process.
Who can say that these photographs of beautiful women don’t mysteriously affect the harvest, the weather, and global politics?
There is a world without men. A world without toil. That’s the world in Vogue. That’s the Harper’s Bazaar world. It’s a world hard as crystal and perfect as ice. No climaxes, just a constant level of ecstasy. Why come if you are there? It is a world of no sweat. A world of self-referentiality.
Women stand daydreaming in groups, wearing brassieres and panties. Is this lesbian imagery—conscious or unconscious? Or is it a world of pure self? Women sit naked on a beach radiating an orgone flush of sexual energy. And they are all alone. And they don’t mind. They are Buddha nymphs, self-contained batteries of sexual juice, whose sexual short circuit creates a perfect world—solipsistic, parthenogenic, and immune.
It is interesting that both fashion photography, which is supposed to appeal to women, and T&A pornography, which is supposed to appeal to heterosexual men, are void of men. Both represent an erotically self-sufficient woman. Men are turned off by seeing men in their pornography. And if there are males as props in fashion photography, they are usually drone androgynies.
What is this coldness combined with electricity, this vacancy of action, this desert of desire that is the world depicted in fashion photography? It is a perfect world, a woman’s world. There is no violence. There is no disorder. One always senses the world of men existing just outside the frame. This is a woman’s world. But it wouldn’t mean nothing. Nothing. Without a man or a boy to spy on it.
Fashion photography has about as much to do with art as it does with religion. In fact, it could be mistaken for a religion. It is all about worship. But I think it’s just a part of a religion. The religion is beauty, and fashion photography is a pagan trip on the beauty tip.
Fashion photography might often seem stupid and shallow, but who can say that these photographs of beautiful women don’t mysteriously affect the harvest, the weather, and global politics?
Fashion photography has about as much to do with art as it does with religion. In fact, it could be mistaken for a religion
These photos cannot be studied conventionally. It’s an esoteric art widely imitated by life. Peter Bogdanovich saw Cybill Shepherd on the cover of Bride magazine, then made her a movie star and married her. It is also an art that nature imitates, creating broad-based trends in the DNA transactions of the race.
Fashion photography, with its trite poses, unbelievable situations, and transparent intentions, is an awesome and transcendent power. It is beyond right and wrong. It is almost a force of nature.
As a fashion guru once said, “Think pink!”
