The Extended Runway – Expanding the Language of Fashion

DECEMBER 17, 2022 – JANUARY 14, 2023

How do you photograph desire? What does it look like? Is desire something that one can see, or does it conjure dreams, aspirations and aesthetics deeper than the visual? These are the challenges that have consistently been addressed by the photographers in the exhibition The Extended Runway: Expanding the Language of Fashion. This show is curated to extend our understanding of how desire is created and amplified through the imaginative visual construction of images serving the fashion industry.

How do you photograph desire? What does it look like? Is desire something that one can see, or does it conjure dreams, aspirations and aesthetics deeper than the visual? These are the challenges that have consistently been addressed by the photographers in the exhibition The Extended Runway: Expanding the Language of Fashion. This show is curated to extend our understanding of how desire is created and amplified through the imaginative visual construction of images serving the fashion industry.

For over the last half century great photographer have taken up the challenge, along side of prominent designers, of articulating a fresh visual language to champion the work of culturally elite figures from the fashion world. After Word War II in America and Europe, there emerged a rising middle and upper class, more leisure time was created, and ‘haute couture’ became a mark of distinction. Fashion based photography emanated from a need to serve this consumer market.

If one looks back to the 50’s, Horst P. Horst, George Hoyningen–Huene, Irving Penn and Edward Steichen were essential photographers in setting the visual foundations for the leading style magazines of the day. The photographic equipment of their time including large box cameras, slow speed film, and theatrical lights. Thus the images, even though they were steeped in elegance and refinement, were more static and composed than the kind of pictures that we are used to seeing now.

Jumping forward a decade, photographers such as William Klein, Frank Horvat, Richard Avedon, Melvin Sokolsky, and William Helburn broke free of the studio limitations of the previous generation. They were adventurous in the use of non-fashion settings, they often used hand held cameras, created images outdoors, and broke conventional rules of composition, tight focus and depth of field. The fashion pictures needed to keep renewing themselves in style as the society and social mores changed. The mythology of the fashion was attuned to “latest, most chic, and most fashion forward.” The delivery and presentation of corresponding images had to adapt and reflect these changes.

With the upheaval of the 1960’s moving into the 1970’s counterculture had its influence on society. The world, and fashion, became less formal and designers wanted to embrace what was fresh, new and exciting. The photographers helped sell the allure of a new lifestyle and the designers, with their clothes, embraced a salute to popular society and culture as well as a breaking down of style barriers needed images that looked more spontaneous and less formal. As culture accelerated its dynamics, photographs became more ‘snap shot’ in their look. Photographers such as Jim Lee, Harry Benson, Clive Arrowsmith, Rodney Smith, Helmut Newton, Barbara Cole and Arthur Elgort became provocateurs of culture – creating bold, daring and, on the surface, images that looked less like fashion pictures and more like narratives or vignettes. Fashion was no longer seen as apart from the fabric of daily life, but was an extension to an interesting –but still often privileged life. The “runway” extended further in the direction of mass culture. Currently many of these photographers are still working.

In a world dominated by Instagram, Twitter, Flickr, TikTok and other mediums of immediate self-publication these top photographers have created an immediacy with seemingly less refined, and more personal images. Photographs, in general have become disposable, short term, and less about ‘telling’ a truth than ‘manufacturing’ one. In this capacity, the context for the production and appreciation of great fashion pictures is incredibly relevant to our society’s ever-growing desire to consume images. The fundamental differences are the depth, quality and richness of the photographs that artists can produce. They ask us to stop and take a closer look and connect with our senses that are deeper than the mere visual. We are invited to be participants in an imagined world dominated by the latest styles.

Taken as a group, the Photographers in The Extended Runway help us to re-imagine beauty and high fashion. The elite group of photographers have used a range of strategies that give their work their own imprint and style. Their resultant images are a product of their imagination, creativity and vision as mediated through the vicissitudes of fashion. They are capable of transporting us, if only for a moment, beyond the “runway” and connecting us to our dreams and desires.