Through the Lens: A Cultural Study of Women's Fashion Photography in Australia 1890 to 2000 (2005-2007)
Abstract
This proposal offers the first cultural history of Australian women s fashion photography c.1890-2000. Its novel methodology comprises two parts. Firstly it constructs on CD a textual and digital image catalogue of Australia s photographers and their works plus an ecology of related social professional institutional and commercial registers in an international context. Data is then theorized to reconceptualize what fashion means. Book and article outcomes examine the mediation of fashionable femininity and its dissemination by exposing complex interactions between ideal clothing (aesthetics) and the social and commercial underpinnings of fashion showing fashion photography to be about far more than style.
