Fashion photography as art

Fashion meets fine art: "Elizabeth Berkley on a Thick Dirty Green Carpet, Los Angeles" (1995) by Cook Fine Arts artist Bettina Reims, and "L'Ange noir" (2006) for "Numero" by Miles Aldridge — who had a fall show at Cook beside Simon Emmett. Images courtesy of Cook Fine art.

One of the things we touched on at the Emerge Exposed panel discussion a couple nights ago was the distinction between commercial and art photography. Fashion photography blurs this line. Art+ Auction has a great article about the topic this month here.

The boundary between commercial and fine-art photography has become increasingly porous in the past decade, as more and more fashion images commissioned by publications and designers are finding their way into museums, galleries and collectors' homes.

Pictures produced on assignment by photographers who established themselves during the golden age of fashion photography, from the 1930s through the ’50s, are routinely treated as valuable collectibles. In fact commissioned images by the leading figures from this era — Richard Avedon, Helmut Newton and the still-thriving Irving Penn — have catapulted into the six figures at auction. Take Newton’s Sie Kommen, Paris (Naked and Dressed), Vogue Studios, which captures a pack of models strutting in designer attire next to an identical portrait of them in the nude. The photograph made its way from a 1981 issue of French Vogue to Christie’s New York in December 2008, where an editioned print fetched $662,500. That sum is the record price for a commercial fashion photograph at auction. In contrast, the work of today’s most sought-after practitioners in the field is struggling to find a widespread market despite its profound cultural impact.