Queer insurgency: Slava Mogutin and the politics of camp

2021 ◽  
Vol 8 (1-2) ◽  
pp. 141-161
Author(s):  
Graham H. Roberts
Keyword(s):  
New York ◽  
Identity Politics ◽  
Visual Analysis ◽  
Modern World ◽  
Fashion Industry ◽  
Analysis Methodology ◽  
American Artist ◽  
Fashion Photography ◽  
Political Challenge ◽  
Political Form

The subject of this article is Russo-American artist Slava Mogutin. A close associate of Gosha Rubchinskiy and Lotta Volkova, Mogutin has been based in New York since 1995. While he originally shot to fame as a poet and novelist, Mogutin is today better known as a performance artist, filmmaker and photographer. The aim of my article is to locate Mogutin, and in particular his fashion photography, within current debates around the representation of masculinity and the construction of masculine subjectivity/-ies. More specifically, using a visual analysis methodology, I analyse the camp aesthetics of Mogutin’s fashion imagery. In a number of ways, Mogutin’s camp aesthetic raises questions about displacement and identity, the clash between individual desires and social norms and – as he puts it – ‘what it means to be a young man in the modern world’. It also constitutes an avowedly political challenge, not just to the state-sponsored homophobia and heteronormativity of Mogutin’s native Russia but also to the identity politics underpinning today’s fashion industry. I conclude by suggesting that Mogutin’s openly political form of camp might pose a challenge to the traditional Sontagian view of camp as apolitical.

Collaboration, competition and conflict: The collective labour of fashion photography at US Vogue (1940–42)

2021 ◽  
Vol 8 (2) ◽  
pp. 195-211 ◽  
Author(s):  
Marlène Van de Casteele
Keyword(s):  
Decision Making ◽  
New York ◽  
Material Culture ◽  
Media Industry ◽  
Fashion Industry ◽  
Power Structures ◽  
Historical Sources ◽  
Fashion Photography ◽  
Artistic Directors ◽  
Conde Nast

While the figure of the fashion photographer has been widely discussed, little has been written on image-making as a collective endeavour. Fashion photography indeed results from technical innovations, publishing strategies, editorial policies, behind-the-scenes negotiations and, ultimately, decision-making. This article analyses ‘The Condé Nast Papers’ – a series of internal documents held at the Condé Nast archives in New York – together with US Vogue and Harper’s Bazaar’s editorials and covers to explore how fashion photographs resulted from the collective labour of photographers, editors, artistic directors and many others in the early 1940s. Through these unique historical sources, this article gives a voice to the workers involved in the making of fashion images and shows how decision-making and creativity were distributed across occupations. It also unpacks the negotiations, arbitrations and power relations that underpinned work relations at US Vogue, showing the collaboration, competition and conflict between the different actors. Drawing on art sociologist Howard Becker’s concept of ‘art worlds’ while combining methods from fashion history and visual and material culture, I question the respective status of the multiple authors involved in this activity and the conventions of fashion image-making. In doing so, I argue that fashion photographs are the product of the interactions of a multitude of workers who are embedded in the power structures of the fashion media industry, and whose collective labour is made invisible. My goal is to rethink the ways in which collective labour has been evidenced and produced in the fashion industry.

scholarly journals Fashion/Photo/Film: The Intertextual Discourse of Funny Face (1956)

2018 ◽  
Vol 1 (1) ◽  
pp. 1-33
Author(s):  
Paul Jobling
Keyword(s):  
New York ◽  
Social Practice ◽  
Costume Design ◽  
Dual Process ◽  
Fashion Industry ◽  
Cultural Leadership ◽  
Art And Design ◽  
Fashion Photography ◽  
And Gender ◽  
Relationship Of

In this paper I mobilize Funny Face (dir. Stanley Donen, 1956) to examine the intertextual nexus between fashion, fashion photography, and film. Set in New York City and Paris, with costume design by Hubert de Givenchy and Edith Head, the film is a latter day telling of the Pygmalion myth, such that photographer Dick Avery (Fred Astaire) and Maggie Prescott (Kay Thompson), the dictatorial Fashion Editor of Quality, take up the challenge of converting Jo Stockton (Audrey Hepburn), whom they regard as an unprepossessing bookstore intellectual, into a top model. Thus I analyze how a film that is more generally regarded as a benchmark in the Hollywood musical for its exuberant use of colour and songs is, more particularly, a cinematic locus for both the mediation and mediatization of fashionable identities. To this end, I assess how the film elaborates the power of the fashion industry as a matter of social practice in regards to Foucauldian discourse and the related concept of the énoncé, or event/statement. Thus I evince I two events/statements — “Think Pink!” and “Bonjour Paris” — to discuss in particular the relationship of style to national identities and the need or desire for America to assert cultural leadership in fashion photography, art, and design over France in the context of 1950s Cold War politics. By comparison, I enlist the statements, “Take the Picture!” and “A Bird of Paradise,” to examine respectively the dynamic of looking/gazing between the fashion photographer and designer and their (in this case) female models, the nexus between star designing, clothing, and gender identity, and what Foucault calls assujetissement — subjection — which connotes the dual process of Jo’s subordination as well as the act of her becoming or “being made” a subject according to a system of power.

scholarly journals Book Reviews

2021 ◽  
Vol 4 (1) ◽  
pp. 203-212
Author(s):  
Ben Page ◽  
Olga R. Gulina ◽  
Doğuş Şimşek ◽  
Caress Schenk ◽  
Vidya Venkat
Keyword(s):  
New York ◽  
Modern World ◽  
Population Movements ◽  
Historical Perspectives ◽  
Development Politics ◽  
Comparative Review ◽  
Political Challenge ◽  
History Of ◽  
History Of Migration

MIGRANT HOUSING: Architecture, Dwelling, Migration. Mirjana Lozanovska. 2019. Abingdon: Routledge. 242 pages. ISBN 9781138574090 (Hardback).THE AGE OF MIGRATION: International Population Movements in the Modern World. 6th ed. Hein de Haas, Stephen Castles, Mark J. Mille. 2020. London: Red Globe Press. 446 pages. ISBN-13: 978-1352007985.REFUGEE IMAGINARIES: Research across the Humanities. Emma Cox, Sam Durrant, David Farrier, Lyndsey Stonebridge, and Agnes Woolley, eds. 2020. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press. 642 pages. ISBN 9781474443197 (hardback).MIGRATION AS A (GEO-)POLITICAL CHALLENGE IN THE POST-SOVIET SPACE: Border Regimes, Policy Choices, Visa Agendas. Olga R. Gulina. 2019. Stuttgart: Ibidem Verlag. 120 pages. ISBN: 9783838213385.COMPARATIVE REVIEW: Migration and Development in India: Provincial and Historical PerspectivesINDIA MOVING: A History of Migration. Chinmay Tumbe. 2018. New York: Penguin Viking. 285 pages. ISBN: 9780670089833.PROVINCIAL GLOBALISATION IN INDIA: Transregional Mobilities and Development Politics. Carol Upadhya, Mario Rutten, and Leah Koskimaki, eds. 2020. New York: Routledge. 193 pages. ISBN: 978-1-138-06962-6.

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