Fashion photo show focuses on portrayal of women

Fashion photos advertise what a trendy wardrobe looks like. And decades after they are taken, these photos become historical records. So, when you go through them, you understand why "Coco" Chanel (1883-1971) once said, "Fashion passes, style remains".

Coming into Fashion, an exhibition organized by the international nonprofit Foundation for the Exhibition of Photography, is now on show at the Ullens Center for Contemporary Art in Beijing's 798 art zone.

The display of 160 images, which reviews the evolution of fashion over the past century, features Broadway actresses and iconic faces from the catwalk. It also celebrates the creativity of some 75 photographers who influenced the fashion history. They include Horst P. Horst and Peter Lindbergh.

Exhibition curator Nathalie Herschdorfer selected the works from Conde Nast's image archives in New York, Paris, Milan and London. There are several million photos in the collection.

Conde Nast, the New York-headquartered media company founded in 1909, owns many magazines including Vanity Fair, Vogue and The New Yorker.

The exhibition also showcases dozens of fashion magazines from Cond?? Nast's stable.

Launched in 2012, the Coming into Fashion exhibition has traveled to 12 cities including Berlin, Edinburgh, Moscow and Tokyo. Its last leg in Taipei attracted some 65,000 visitors, says FEP's website.

Herschdorfer says that when she conceived of the exhibition, she tried to forget about the history and the big names in photography.

She says the concept of the show is to focus on the "almost timeless" aspect of fashion photography and to show it in a "very strong way".

"It may sound contradictory because fashion should be about today and the images are for now," says Herschdorfer.

"But when people see photos from the 1940s, they still find them appealing."

She adds that the photos also show what society felt about women in different eras.

"It is not what a woman looks like in real life, but how time expects a woman to be represented."

The exhibition highlights company founder Conde Montrose Nast's belief that it is artists who produce powerful images.

Herschdorfer says when Nast bought Vogue in 1905, he started to work with some of the best fashion illustrators, and that is why the magazine produced beautiful covers, some of which are now on show at UCCA.

"Later, when Nast hired photographers, he did not go to technicians who knew how to handle a camera," says Herschdorfer. "But he went to recognized artists and asked if they would do fashion photography for the magazine."

She says many photographers featured at the exhibition were trained as artists and were much more interested in art than in fashion; this is why their photos still look powerful today.

Commenting on the photos, Angelica Cheung, Vogue China's editor-in-chief, says that because there was no photo editing software and the camera functions were very limited in the old days, there was an image, and a strong point of view in the photographers' heads before they took the pictures.

Today, technological developments offer many possibilities, she says, and photographers, as a result, tend to rely too much on post production.

"Technology is not the problem. It is the impact of technology on the way photographers create that causes the problem.

"The downside is that people tend not to think through about what they want to convey through an image, and what elements to use to help them communicate that message."

She adds that photographers today are no different from those in bygone eras because they are people who are committed to their point of view and they strive to express it using different ways.

"The logic to produce a strong photo, whether today or in the past, is the same," says Cheung.

If you go

10 am-7 pm, Tuesdays through Sundays, through March 5. 4 Jiuxianqiao Road, Chaoyang district, Beijing. 010-5780-0200.