Fahion photoggraphy is a big lie!
Fashion photography is all about an illusion. It gives a solid form for the ideas we have in our heads, whether pure, provocative, disturbing, sensitive or naïve. While you need guts to jump in front of a bullet to catch its trace with your camera, you will need unlimited imagination to create a fashion illusion. “It’s a big lie!” says my interviewee, “it’s out of our world and that’s why we like to live in it!”
Toufic Araman, 32, is a young daring fashion-commercial-art photographer with a tendency to experiment and manipulate. Single, Toufic is partially Lebanese and partially Egyptian. He was born in Egypt, but lived his early 10 years in Lebanon until the Civil War broke out and his family immigrated to Egypt. Currently, he is located in two vibrant cities, New York and Dubai. Toufic graduated from the American University in Cairo with a major in Economics and a minor in Fine Arts. Eventually, he got hooked on art and photography leaving his degree in economics for the fate to decide.
Though he wouldn’t reveal his income, modestly enough he said that he is a successful photographer. With only three years of experience, the list of his clientele is rather impressive; Abu Dhabi Tourism Authority, Al Tayer Fashion Group, Burj Al Arab, Think Magazine, Four Points Sheraton, Jumeirah Beach Magazine, HSBC, Sheraton Starwoods and Ski Dubai to name a few. Ambitious enough, he wants to be a major player on the Middle Eastern photography market and he realizes what it takes.
Fashion is Art What’s fashion photography? Those slim models gifted with a physique that can make Aphrodite blush, tickling our imagination with their feathery eyelashes, and smiling like there is no tomorrow? No it’s not. Guy Bourdin, one of the best-known fashion photographers of the 20th Century, was known for trying the endurance of his models. He let them twist in uncomfortable, surreal positions for his gloomy images. Along with another Vogue photographer, Helmut Newton, they brought a new edge in fashion photography, conjuring the erotic and the imaginative with political and social issues.
When Bourdin’s photographs were accused of overtly sexual narratives, he said, “Don’t make me laugh, this is art!” Richard Avedon, who was named one of the world’s ten finest photographers in 1958, positioned supermodel Dorothy Horan amid a line of elephants for a Dior photo shoot. One of the 21st century’s most traveled and influential fashion photographers, Mario Testino, who has unsurpassed access to the most magnetic stars of popular culture, like Princess Diana and her sons, Madonna, Janet Jackson, Angelina Jolie and Brad Pitt, stripped off the glamour revealing a soft fragility.
Toufic developed his skills from studying works of those photographers. “There are no limits in photography!” He says. Fashion photography is not predictable, rigid and impersonal like before. Occasionally we would say that those virtuosi photographers couldn’t paint, so they grabbed a camera instead. Photographers, like Toufic, are hard to pinpoint from the beginning because there must be something different, alluring and even disturbing in their work.
In Toufic’s work, either commercial or conceptual, there is a story. When you look at his photographs, you have a sudden feeling that there is something that just happened or will happen. Laws of physics are confronted in his photographs, lines of light traveling around, models leaving ghostly traces after them, or frozen in the air or appear at two places in one time. In his photography of food, Toufic uses unusual objects. “I am trying to make a photograph that you can hang on your wall.” Often enough, according to Toufic, his food photographs are regarded as “sensual” or “sexy”.
Staging the concept Toufic’s web site reads: “It [photography] could gather all the elements of a 10 minute film in one single frame. One shot, and the message is there: crystal clear.” So I asked which of his works could be an example. He told me about his project “Superstation”, which originated from a collective brainstorming session on the classical problems of the Middle East. The project was executed in a symbolic, intense and a stage-like way. A gas station: Two gas containers resembling the Twin Towers, on their sides there are two young people packed with western ideologies from inside and out. One of them thinks to light up a cigarette, a cigarette that can blow off all this ‘oiled-reality’. On the foreground, the same man with the same book in three religious dimensions: Islam, Christianity and Judaism. “It’s all one source, but used for different reasons, religion is used to fuel up the conflict”, he added. It took Toufic three months of work to put this project together.
“Superstation” was shown at the Noorderlicht Festival in Holland and at the Brecht Forum ‘Censorship Show’ in 2007. “It is a staged documentary photography because I am not a street or war photographer, I am an art photographer,” asserted Toufic, “I take people’s works and translate them into my own language.” If we look back at when the idea of staged photography started, we recall Gioacchino Altobelli's (1814-78) image of Italian troops ‘storming’ Rome's Porto Pia on 21 September 1870, the day after the actual event. Though the fictional and artistic impulses of staged photography persisted through out the 20th century, it was criticized especially by conceptualism, which was concerned primarily with the idea behind the work of art rather than the artwork itself.
Ringing names in staged photography’s history would be de Meyer, Beaton, Yevonde, Cahun, Hannah Starkey and Helmut Newton. Nowadays, the fantasies of glamour and consumption became central to fashion and advertising photography, that is seen along the story lines of Toufic’s photographs.
Selling art “There is something of romance about art, but it is only in our minds and not in the real world!” In the world of market demand where Toufic swims, art juggles with business. Talent alone is not enough.
According to economic sociologist Patrick Aspers, in his book “Markets in Fashion: A phenomenological approach,” he stated that uniqueness, innovation, creativity and personal style are celebrated qualities especially in aesthetic market. Besides that, he also stressed on the importance of economical values for the actors of this market.
Toufic explained that the reason behind his success is that he mastered both skills: creativity and business. You have to have an eccentric ego and budget enough to lure the market’s equilibrium; otherwise you need business skills to polish your status. Markets, even aesthetic, are about the distribution of statuses. Toufic emphasizes on the process of branding, networking, balanced financing and, of course, producing a brilliant art. “There is rent, electricity bills and taxes to be paid,” Toufic says with a whiff of a tactical insight. Although he integrates art into his commercial work, he is not putting his conceptual works into the market. “In business, image is used for a purpose to sell an idea or to sell a product, that in itself compromises the integrity.” So I had to ask Toufic: do you feel suppressed as an art photographer by your clients’ demands? Do you feel uncomfortable about that? Toufic: “I love my commercial work in a product, food or a hotel! I integrate my art into it, a part of me, and that gives the edge to the final result and makes it successful!”
The aesthetic market, where Toufic Araman works, roughly represents two of logic’s poles: The logic of art dictates the editorial photography, and the logic of economy dictates the advertising photography. The latter is more restricted.
Intoxication A famous German philosopher, Friedrich Nietzsche, said, “For art to exist, for any sort of aesthetic activity or perception to exist, a certain physiological precondition is indispensable: intoxication!”
For my interviewee it is a vibrant, complicated and intense culture. Dubai is an economical miracle – the influx of foreign investors, decades of double-digit growth and all those workers who were drawn to free-tax climate – all wrapped in a fantastic architecture. Still, it lacks solid identity, either because of being one of the most diverse cities with more than 150 nationalities, or simply because it’s a city where you make money, that's how Toufic feels about it. “It’s [Dubai] a relatively new city, art culture is not quite developed there, and there is not much value for inspiration.” He explained that the art society needs writers, painters, photographers and other artists to fill in, and that takes time. Toufic's muse city is the city that never sleeps, New York. “It’s intense, it’s vibrant!” He finds that the complexity of people inspires his artistic tendencies.
Toufic is really looking forward to working in Egypt. He sees that Egypt has a lot of unused potential, commonly disregarded by local photographers, reasoning that by lack of exposure. “What lack of exposure? There’s Internet. I learned from the Internet! There is no such excuse as lack of exposure,” he explains. Though Toufic had an opportunity to study in New York in two well-known photography schools; International Center of Photography and Visual Arts School, he stresses on how Internet helped him to hone his skills. There is a fine line between subjectivity and objectivity in art. The glamour, egoism, fierce market, dreams, perfectionism and even obscenity in fashion photography leave little chances for objectivity to survive. “I love to manipulate!” Stresses Toufic, “I love it because it gives the sense of creation.” Toufic plays a trick with the viewer, but only to make the viewer feel the dynamics of a still image. In his opinion, the photograph will always choose the angle, the lightening, the frame and a second to click on the shutter. In the end, it’s just a beautiful fantasy.