Wednesday 17 March 2010

The Fashionista

As part of my studies years ago, our class split into groups in order to do a collaborative fashion shoot.

The idea was largely mine and involved using lyrics from pop hits of the day as a subtle pisstake on the whole seriousness of the fashion industry and fashion photography in particular. Though I'm not sure if anybody else picked up on that.

So we had our very girlie model doing dumb things with stereotypically female appliances.

It was hard work cos the model didn't really buy into the idea, and wasn't a natural performer - happy to look all moody fashiony but not so happy to 'act'.

It was kinda fun though. Not that it made me change my mind about fashion photography.

We didn't get a particularly great mark for the assignment, largely because our pics didn't meet the requirement of being in the style of a particular magazine. Even though the magazine we choose had only put out one issue and didn't have anything that could be called a photographic style.

Our group also took many people by surprise by deciding to collaborate with students from the fashion school - at that time in buildings adjacent to photography. It was a constant surprise to me that there was a lack of collaboration between the various schools even though there was an awful lot of crossover - industrial designers need product shots, photographers need graphic design work, etc. and yet students were (and still are) encouraged to do these things for themselves, and not utilise fellow students actually studying in those areas.

2 comments:

nic from ecology said...

I remember hearing the story of this shoot at the time, especially about the model just not buying into the idea. I reckon looking at the best of the shots here I'd never guess it was such a "difficult" shoot. Unfortunately I'm not the one who was grading the assignments.....

microphen said...

a good photographer will work with the talent to extract what they want from them. and then bitch about it later. to anyone who'll listen. much like i'm doing here.