This blog post focuses on a range of alike factors within street fashion photography and I will be looking at different contributors to a particular look of street fashion photography. This post focuses on the particular style of candid, informal and ‘snap-shot’ like images that come from worldwide events such as Fashion Weeks in cities such as London, New York and Paris. I will also be looking at a couple of photographers and their contribution to this style of fashion photography through the work they have made. This style of photography differs to what I am producing where I focus heavily on creating high quality, well composed, framed and edited images that coincide with the actual content – my work is a combination of subjects and their passion for clothes as well as well thought-out images to coincide with this and document. The style I am going to show here focuses more on the fashion aspect and documenting it with a snap shot on the street and this type of photography is present even in Jersey in Gallery magazine where they often include a segment looking at randomers on the street and their choice of clothes that day. It was photographers like Bill Cunningham in New York who pioneered this quick, snapshot like photography.
Shoichi Aoki is a Japense photographer and the creator of STREET Magazine, TUNE Magazine and FRUiTS magazine.
Aoki was born in Tokyo and began documenting street fashion in Tokyo’s fashionable Harajuku in the mid 1990s when he noticed a change in the way young people were dressing. Rather than following European and American trends, the Japanese community as a whole, not just young people were customising elements of traditional Japanese dress including changing the way traditional garments such as kimonos, obi sashes and geta sandals looked. People also combined them with handmade, secondhand and alternative designer fashion in an innovative DIY approach to dressing.
street fashion >> street fashion is fashion that is considered to have emerged not from studios, but from the grassroots streetwea - generally associated with youth culture, and is most often seen in major urban centers.
streetwear >> casual clothing of a style worn especially by members of various urban youth subcultures.
fashion week >> A fashion week is a fashion industry event, lasting approximately one week, wherein fashion designers, brands or "houses" display their latest collections in runway fashion shows to buyers and the media. These events influence trends for the current and upcoming seasons. As well, the media provide coverage and documentation on the influence this week has on the rest of the public as they make an effort to style the most sought-after brands and this is where the element of street photography coincides with the more rigid approach to a professional fashion shoot in several cities where brands hoard to show off new collections.
In 1997, Aoki founded the monthly magazine FRUiTS, now a cult fanzine with an international following, to record and celebrate the freshness of fashion in Harajuku.
fanzine >> a magazine, usually produced by amateurs, for fans of a particular performer, group, or form of entertainment.
STREET magazine is a publication that looks at several of the worlds fashion weeks each year and documents the happenings on the streets of the cities during the fashion week. It was founded by Shoichi Aoki.
FRUiTS magazine is a fanzine that looks at the new and emerging Japanese street style of fashion taken up by many of the country’s sub cultures. It looks specifically at the style of females in the popular area of Harajuku and the photography adopts an amateur-like approach where composition or range of shots are not taken into account. Instead, all shots are full body shots of people who have been briefly stopped in the street for a photo. It was this sort of street photograph that pioneered the much more contemporary, staged and formal shots today and American photographer Bill Cunningham showed off this much more subtle approach to photographing strangers tremendously in his work before his passing in 2016. I will now move onto to talk about his unique approach to documentation the New York style on the same streets for his whole career.
William John “Bill” Cunningham Jr. (March 13, 1929 – June 25, 2016) was an American fashion photographer for The New York Times, known for his candid and street photography.
He began taking candid photographs on the streets of New York City, and his work came to the attention of The New York Times with a 1978 capture of Greta Garbo, a Swedish film actress in an unguarded moment. Cunningham reported for the paper from 1978 to 2016.
Cunningham contributed significantly to fashion journalism, introducing American audiences to Azzedine Alaïa (a Tunisian fashion designer known for manufacturing and selling clothes tailored to specific clients in the 1980s) and Jean Paul Gaultier (a pret-a-porter fashion designer in the late 1900s). While working at Women’s Wear Daily and the Chicago Tribune, he began taking candid photographs of fashion on the streets of New York. Cunningham was a self-taught photographer.
fashion journalism >> fashion journalism involves all aspects of published fashion media, including fashion writers, fashion critics, and fashion reporters. Fashion journalists are either employed full-time by a publication or are employed on a freelance basis.
Both photographers Aoki and Cunningham adopted this candid, very informal style of photography which was introduced mainly by other street fashion photographers such as David Bailey and William Klein. However, in my work, I will be focusing more on the actual characters I am photographing and showing this in both my visual work and the text I hope to include alongside the visuals which reveal more about the subjects in an expository style. I will be sing my skills as a photographer to compose and frame a photograph alongside my need to collaborate with my subject to create an intimate and poetic image that underpins the proliferation of fashion and brands and how people are becoming ever-more aware of their appearance – especially boys when males can feel lost in a society that doesn’t really take in to account the inevitable vulnerability of boys during adolescence as they grow up. I will aim to address this very subtly in my work. I am essentially a journalist for my own project.