The History of Fashion Photography

Dust jacket notes: "The first systematic history of fashion photography, this perceptively written and superbly illustrated book deals not only with the somersaults of fashion but with changing trends in photography and in art taste, manners, and social customs. Exploding the theory that commercial photography is not art. Nancy Hall-Duncan shows that many of the world's most celebrated 'art' photographers, among them Andre Kertesz, Edward Steichen, Man Ray, George Platt Lynes, and Diane Arbus, also portrayed fashion. Her absorbing account covers the entire history of the genre, beginning in Paris in the 1850s, when fashion photographs were used mainly to document designs, and continuing up to the 1970s. Included are some seventy richly detailed profiles of fashion's most famous photographers, discussed in relation to artists in other creative fields and to the prevailing mood of society. Here is the 'first' fashion photographer, Baron de Meyer, a dilettante who popularized the style known as pictorialism; Edward Steichen, whose clean geometric modernism updated the medium; Martin Munkacsi (a talent nurtured by the legendary Alexey Brodovitch of Harper's Bazaar), whose realistic out-of-doors shots conveyed the blur of motion; Cecil Beaton, whose fantastic photographic concoctions were sometimes lighthearted and sometimes perverse; the creative giants of the fifties and beyond, Richard Avedon and Irving Penn, whose originality and esprit dominated their era and inspired many followers; the photographer-heroes of the sixties such as David Bailey, who subordinated his art to his lifestyle; finally Guy Bourdin and Helmut Newton, whose horrific and sensual photographs reflect similar themes in films, the arts, and literature. Nancy Hall-Duncan organized the History of Fashion Photography exhibition for the International Museum of Photography at George Eastman House in Rochester, N.Y...." 195 illustrations, including 37 plates in full color. Index.