A Photographic Fragment of Transnational Fashion
image © Instituto Moreira Salles
Look even closer at this highly visualized representation of a modernizing São Paulo and the photograph reveals an added layer of complexity. We begin to observe signs that this “dream city run up for the cinema,” as the French anthropologist Claude Lévi-Strauss recalled in 1955, has been fractured by the very modern technology of the camera itself, which has been so indiscriminate in terms of what it has captured. ¹
There is an excess of the everyday, which escapes the controlling aspirations of the photographic gaze in order to disrupt its careful documentation of emerging social and metropolitan identities as seen in São Paulo’s quotidian urban spaces by capturing, quite literally, too much.
We observe debris in the gutter and a smattering of oil fracturing the clean, rational lines of the recently-built avenue. Ghostly figures populate the background. In the very center of the photograph, two youthful-looking women in puff-sleeved dresses can be just be glimpsed standing aboard a motorcar that speeds past.
This myriad of contingent detail is something that the camera saw, but the photographer may not have spotted in the instant that the shutter was clicked. It is an imperfection that has risen to the grainy surface of the photograph later, waiting to be discovered by the inquisitive viewer.
Christopher Pinney contends that the indexicality of the photographic medium always allows room for the possibility that something extraneous may enter into the camera lens; no matter how precautionary and punctilious the photographer is, the camera necessarily includes and thus it is “precisely photography’s inability to discriminate, its inability to exclude, that makes it so textured and so fertile.” ²
Just as photographs “leak out,” documenting the unexpected or inadvertently providing the viewer with an overload of information, so too can fashion, which frequently communicates something different to that which the wearer had envisioned in her mind, unintentionally revealing too much of an inner personality, desire or anxiety. ³
Fashion is, after all, a form of storytelling, in much the same way that the researcher can muse speculatively on the biographies and narratives of the anonymous individuals who present themselves in dress, pose and expression to the photographer’s gaze.
Footnotes
1: Claude Lévi-Strauss, Tristes Tropiques, trans. John Russell (New York: Criterion, 1961), 135.
2: Christopher Pinney, “Introduction: “How the Other Half…,’” in Photography’s Other Histories, ed. Pinney and Nicolas Peterson (Durham: Duke University Press, 2003), 6.
3: This idea came directly from a conversation with Rebecca Arnold. It connects very closely to Hans Belting’s assertion that “We must address the image not only as a product of a given medium, be it photography, painting or video, but also as a product of ourselves, for we generate images of our own (dreams, imaginings, personal perceptions) that we play out against other images in the visible world.” Hans Belting, An Anthropology of Images: Picture, Medium, Body (Princeton University Press, 2011), 2.