Is Fashion Photography History?

Marella Agnelli's neck seemed longer then ever in that famous Richard Avedon photo from 1953. And the 25 scarlet nails set against glistening red lips from Guy Bourdin in 1972 have reached such iconic status that I was told that they are being offered only to museums.

I spent a day at Paris Photo in the French capital (until November 15 at the Grand Palais), where the quality of the work is outstanding. Some of the images are so soulful, shocking or compelling that the appropriate word was the much overused "awesome".

But not the fashion images. With the exception of the whimsical and poetic Tim Walker, whose sweetly surreal 2013 picture of red-head model Karen Elson at a piano with a singing lion was put on display by the Michael Hoppen London gallery, the photographs and their originators were oh, so familiar!

I looked at the Gagosian Gallery's Avedon line up of Marella Agnelli and of Dovima with Elephants (plus a Dior dress), and at Peter Lindbergh's work from the Nineties - and I asked myself why genuinely contemporary fashion photography has so little allure.

Has the fascination with vintage clothing and with current fashion that regurgitates the Fifties, Sixties, Seventies, Eighties - and now those deliberately ugly Nineties - rubbed off on photography itself?

All the gallerists I spoke to said the same thing: that post-production, digital enhancement and a general feeling of muddied waters in the age of the computer has divided photography into a strategic "before" and "after".

"Our show is about purity of work," said Ayse Arnal, director of the Louise Alexander Gallery in Porto Cervo in Italy, referring to the Guy Bourdin work intended for museum acquisitions. On offer, too, were more accessible Polaroids.

Michael Hoppen was scathing about the comparison between the reality of sensuality as photographed by Guy Bourdin and the demand of current editors and publishers to create a disconcerting perfection to human face and figure.

The gallerist showed, as well as the enchanting Tim Walker photographs, a series from Rex/Shutterstock reportage images from the 1977 London punk scene. That was long before the smart devices of the digital age put a stop to such innocently captured images.

There were rare moments of discovery. I found compelling the pixilated effect on a supermodel image created this year by Valérie Belin and shown by Galerie Nathalie Obadia in Brussels and Edwynn Houk Gallery from New York and now Zurich.

Then there were the Pierre & Gilles decorative images, such as a portrait of Spanish actress Rossy de Palma and an exceptional 2015 Magical Mirror image of Olivier Rousteing, creative director of Balmain. This hand-painted portrait photographed on toile stood out at the Galerie Daniel Templon from Brussels.

London's HackelBury Gallery produced two graphic, unseen fashion photographs by William Klein, among other abstract images. While another more conventional, but moving, Klein photograph of actress Anouk Aimée (1961), with cigarette holder as accessory, was on offer at the Gallery Fifty One for €18,452 (£13,065) - just one of many reprinted works of past or present masters.

The price of quality, in the age of the smartphone selfie, is ever upward. Unless I misread the price tag, a 1990 Patrick Demarchelier photograph of Christy Turlington was offered by Camera Work in Berlin for €95,600.

Putting to one side the varied valuation of fashion work, the images were almost entirely from the past, often emphasising the quality of early printing. (The extraordinary carbon colour printing of Sarah Moon's work from 2014 at the Camera Obscura gallery was an exception.)

Nick Knight, the British photographer and early creator of fashion film, visited Paris Photo and will receive the Isabella Blow award as fashion creator at the British Fashion Awards at the end of this month. He credits Irving Penn for turning photography into an art form.

But you can't help wondering whether the power of the moving image and the involvement in film of so many current photographers, has moved the goal posts.

Those photographers who shaped their art in a pre-digital age are - just like fashion designers themselves - taking to shows in museums. Sarah Moon will have a retrospective in the House of Photography in Hamburg from November 27. And Vogue 100: A Century of Style will open at London's National Portrait Gallery on February 11.

The National Portrait Gallery Celebrates Vogue

September 2016 will see the Kunsthal in Rotterdam present a retrospective of Peter Lindbergh, A Different History of Fashion, curated by Thierry-Maxime Loriot.

I still feel intuitively that fashion images, as we have known them, are in decline - whether from a lack of originality, the lure of post-production or even the competition - ridiculous as this sounds - between the glossy professional style and the dynamic smartphone camera grabs.

Coming off Eurostar in London, I went to Paul Smith in Albemarle Street to see a David Bailey exhibition celebrating the launch of his 41st book Tears and Tears. You had to see the torn off test tear-strips of unexposed paper to understand the title and the images of anyone from Michael Caine or Jack Nicholson to Mick Jagger, Jean Shrimpton, Zandra Rhodes and varied African warriors.

Paul Smith, who learned to use a camera as a child from his father, was fascinated by the Bailey test sheets and the fact that the photographer had printed everything himself.

I asked Bailey, whose work charted the changing world of England in the Sixties, how he defined good fashion photography.

"My pictures were all about the girl," he said, looking up at the image of Jean Shrimpton, the first model to express the newly liberated Sixties woman. "My fashion pictures were more like portraits."

Guy Bourdin, French Vogue March 1972
Guy Bourdin, French Vogue, early Seventies, Louise Alexander Gallery in Porto Cervo.
An unseen image for Charles Jourdan by Guy Bourdin, spring 1978.
Karen Elson by Tim Walker.
Magical Mirror portrait of Olivier Rousteing, creative director of Balmain, by Pierre & Gilles, photographed on toile and hand-painted, 2015. Galerie Daniel Templon, Brussels.
Marella Agnelli, by Richard Avedon, 1953.
Valérie Belin, Ishtar 2015, by Galerie Nathalie Obadia from Brussels and Edwynn Houk Gallery from New York and now Zurich.
Anouk Aimée with cigarette holder, by William Klein, 1961, at Gallery Fifty One.
Christy Turlington, 1990, by Patrick Demarchelier, New York, Camera Work Gallery, Berlin.
Sarah Moon, Camera Obscura Gallery.
Dorothy McGowan juggling white light balls, by William Klein, Paris 1962, at the HackleBury Gallery, London.
Dolores wants a taxi, New York, 1958, Vogue, Gallery Fifty One.
Suzy Msource:
enkes and David Bailey.
Tears and Tears, a new book by David Bailey, was launched last night at Paul Smith's Albemarle Street store, along with an exhibition of Bailey's test tear-sheets, which include a portrait of Mick Jagger.