Fashion as art. Art as fashion: Border crossing

What happens when the fashion image becomes tableau-photography and contemporary art stages designers’ clothes? Both realities mingle. Merge. “Undecidability” emerges, leaving us speechless. The nature of the depiction is indefinable. The difference between the image of fashion and art becomes elusive. In the photographs of Glen Luchford and Izima Kaoru, narratives tell a story through a single frame. They both create a tale of fashion, violence, murder and elliptically connoted sexuality. A tale that takes place in the spectator’s reception and subjectivity rather then in the interiority of the frame’s limits. At the very most, the composition induces a series of iconographic signs guiding our interpretation, but questions remain unanswered. Here, no photo stories spreading across pages but only a minimal narrative. Luchford’s woman wears Prada. Kaoru’s woman wears Yves Saint Laurent Rive Gauche. Between the two photographers, who’s exhibiting in galleries and who’s creating commercial fashion campaigns? Glen Luchford creates fashion images in the way of Gregory Crewdson, Deborah Mesa-Pelly and Sam Taylor-Wood. Izima Kaoru pays tribute to “the device in fashion photography of pairing ideas of cultural and commercial beauty with abject social narratives”[1]. Two statements whose only sources are literally in the captions.

[1] Charlotte COTTON, «Once upon a time» in The photograph as contemporary art, London, Thames & Hudson, 2009, p.69
Pictures (in order):
Izima Kaoru, Landscapes with a Corpse (41), Hasegawa Kyoko wears Yves Saint Laurent Rive Gauche 2003, 2005
Glen Luchford, Spring/Summer Prada Campaign 1997, Dye destruction print, 36.5 x 51 cm