Reframing Fashion Photography: Between the Magazine Page and the Gallery Wall

Fashion photography, a genre often relegated to the margins of photographic history, has played a central role in cultural and economic systems since it began replacing drawn illustration in the late nineteenth century. In recent years it has occupied a prominent place in museums, and its growing visibility on gallery walls heightens the need for new scholarship on the genre. While Nancy Hall-Duncan’s The History of Fashion Photography (1978) remains a touchstone, more recent surveys have expanded Duncan’s account (Martineau, ed., Icons of Style, 2018; Aletti, Issues, 2019) and highlighted the work that remains to be done, including research into individual photographers and broader methodological reflections. This panel will question how we define “fashion photography,” taking an expansive view of what fashion photographs achieve. While commonly defined in terms of its purpose to sell clothes, fashion photography advertises aspirational lifestyles, proclaims what it means for people or things to be desirable, and reifies conceptions of gender. This session invites contributions from any period or region to examine fashion photography's roles within photographic history, fashion history, and the history of modern art.

Topics may include:

• Fashion photography’s many formats, including exhibition prints and illustrated periodicals
• The reception of historic fashion photographs
• Gender, desire, and queer theory in fashion photography
• Fashion photography’s construction of racial identities
• Rethinking authorship and researching collaborative practices
• Global, transnational, or decolonial histories of fashion photography
• The impact of current media platforms and image-making technology upon contemporary fashion photography