Navigation

In 1967, American Vogue published « The Quest for Beauty in Dahomey, » a 16-pages photographic essay shot by American photographer Irving Penn, accompanied by a scientific text by Belgian ethnologist Jacques Maquet. While it has seldom been critically analyzed, fashion photography has a long-standing tradition of fascination for ethnographic subjects, categories and imagery. Conversely, visual anthropology has often been accused of aestheticizing “the Other.” Photographs such as Penn’s, that flirt seductively with both fashion and ethnography, were widely disseminated in periodicals such as National Geographic, Life and Vogue. Mainstream press, and the fashion press in particular, has largely participated in the naturalization of the Euro-American worldview. Can fashion photography help us rethink the categories of anthropological knowledge?

This session will explore photographic works produced at the intersection of fashion and ethnography, that convey an aesthetic and a particular worldview. Our focus will be on images circulating via mainstream magazines--understood here, after Mary Louise Pratt, as « contact zones, » that is as sites of encounter between Euro-American and Global South cultures and aesthetics within the context of unbalanced power relations. We welcome papers located at the critical juncture of fashion studies, media studies and postcolonial studies that interrogate the reciprocal influences of fashion and ethnography as they unfold in a variety of images, be they editorials, advertisements, photographic campaigns or commissioned series, from the 19th century until today.