Fashion photography is not immune from the economic downturn. Its importance in our industry can’t be overlooked. Designers depend on editorial fashion photography to bring their creations to the attention of the buying public. Magazines depends on fashion photography to give their titles allure and status. The more luxurious the image, the more affluent the demographic attracting advertisers. It’s a mystical ring of fire.

Fashion photography does a lot more. It molds careers. Fashion photography takes young women with beauty, ambition and intelligence, gives them a chance to shine in the public arena. Many of our most talented performers have come from humble backgrounds as fashion models. It’s the perfect Cinderella story.

Fashion photography is in trouble! Magazine circulation is down all over the world, and the Internet has yet to come up with a proper medium to take its place. Most fashion magazines online are still struggling with inadequate software, hard to read text, small images lacking detail. Nothing can replace the experience and touch of a high resolution page under your finger tips. Which is why print fashion magazines are here to stay.

The way they are being circulated and distributed is changing. Newsstands are dropping fashion titles because fashion magazines have never been mainstream. They’ve always been an acquired taste for a choice clientele, which sets the trends, and trickles down with their sense of style. For decades before there was a successful US ELLE edition, you would find copies of French ELLE in every beauty salon in America!

There has never been more fashion magazines on the market than today, but they are rare and hard to find. These two books, and the bi-annual conference they chronicle Colophon, appears to have successfully addressed the problem, by giving readers and fashion photography enthousiasts the means of collecting their favorite titles, by reaching them online.

Fashion magazines are the outlet for a multitude of trades; photographers, designers, stylists, make-up artists, graphic artists, illustrators, models, set designers, lighting designers… Without fashion magazines, the digital world hasn’t caught up with the more sensual needs of the fashion world. They’re still hell bent on designing war games for overstimulated teenagers.

As newsstands and libraries cut down on their selection of titles, many titles die, without the window of opportunity to the world these shelves provide. This is where a space like The Aquarium fills the gap, a countercultural library in Norwalk, Connecticut, which stocks a large selection of international fashion titles, not for sale, but for the pleasure of its members.

Dedicated fashion newsstands are few… It takes a large metropolitan city like London to support a store like RDFranks. If the fashion photographs showcasing the lines of designers, make-up companies and other products strategically placed in the images do not reach a maximum number of viewers who are going to desire the items on display, the dollars that go into the production of this art form will dwindle.

I love fashion photography. If I wasn’t so busy trying to save the planet from imploding, I’d be out there with a camera shooting all day… I envy the state of political bliss most fashion photographers live with, while knowing that the best work often comes from politically charged images! Fashion photography has always rode the shock wave of the times… especially in the 60’s and 70’s… while strangely, disconnecting from current events in recent years, which might explain its lack of relevance.

What always made an extraodinary fashion image, was a sense of subliminal awe you felt looking at the personality of the model, the expression in the eyes, the beauty of the clothes, the subtlety of the foundation, the quality of the paper, the ink, the sensuality of the whole presentation, no matter what the subject. This can be faked, it often is, which is why so much of it today might look like the real thing, but falls short, has no meaning, fashion without substance is criminal, it’s greenwashing.

The sustainable fashion industry has a responsibility to not only preserve the art of fashion photography, but to restore its standing in the world, as one of the great cooperative art forms. The great photographers of today, rare few exceptions, have been devoid of green ideology, so when hired to portray green trends, fall short of the task for failing to grasp the finer sensibilities of the spirituality that comes with the assignment. In this respect, many models and designers are way ahead of the curve.

Fashion photographers answer to the needs of the editors… Editors answer to the expectations of their readers and advertisers, carefully weighing the trade offs. Our green fashion industry is growing its own titles, many of them listed on our Paper Project page. These two books from Gestalten may not show you how to generate green images, but they will point the way to all the publications green fashion professionals need to know about to grow their own business concerns. They contain vast definitive listings of all the available fashion titles today, from every nation on Earth, with contact information. They are beautifully produced and worth every penny.