Grok My Enthusiasm (33)

By: Claire Lehmann
August 24, 2016

One in a weekly series of enthusiastic posts contributed by HILOBROW friends and regulars.

I’ve long been fascinated by instances in visual culture when carefully managed illusions are emphatically punctured. At the end of the 1971 film Two-Lane Blacktop, for example, the final image is gradually obscured by a growing burn-out spot, as though the reel has stalled in the projector while the heat from the lamp overpowers the polyester substrate; at that moment, the viewer can only focus on the physical material that has been conveying the illusion all along. Various approaches to revealing a form’s technical apparatus have been heavily theorized and employed since at least the 1930s in film and theater, but the trope was less well-worn in still photography, which is why I love two early examples in that medium — one in a 1935 promotional booklet, Color Sells, touting the benefits of advertising in Condé Nast’s magazines; and the other in the first-ever “Camera Issue” of Vogue (a Condé Nast title) released in June of 1941.

The cover of Color Sells shows several dimly lit figures maneuvering lights, arranging props, and otherwise milling around a group of three brightly illuminated beauties promoting beach towels, while the Vogue frontispiece features a similar aesthetic, providing a glimpse of another photo studio, “full of confusion, people, and machines,” as the caption notes. Both images bristle with tripods, stands, bulbs, and cords, but I find it pleasantly dizzying to consider the equipment that lies beyond these tableaux — the additional unseen machines providing the illusion that illusion is hereby being exposed.

These two photographs overlap with a decade of fervent analysis of the political ramifications of cultural production, when the now-stock notions of the alienation effect, aura, and the culture industry were first introduced. But what to make of images such as these, which supply not a critique, but an embrace? Here, the various devices are the real models, while the actual ladies merely dress the set, props illustrating the marvels of these stages that manufacture drama for the printed page. Vogue’s “Camera Issue” included a back-of-book page detailing the technical data behind each and every image in the edition — the specs of the camera, lens, filter, exposure, aperture, and even the wattage of the lighting used to create the magazine’s signature glamour — but Color Sells, its predecessor, divulges even more, in a way: the booklet is devoted to educating the potential advertiser on how a color image can stoke the reader’s desire. While Vogue’s fashion editor and detective theatrically confer over a choice of jewels in the foreground’s darkness in the 1941 image, Color Sells reproduces a glorious spread of diamonds and precious stones, with a headline noting that “Color Portrays Jewels to Justify Cost.” Sumptuous images of silver, makeup, tableware, liquor, and objets d’art follow, accompanied by explanations of how such finely wrought reproductions help “open the pocketbook.” The extravagant glamour of the fashion magazine as we know it began in this era of early color, and so I’m particularly amused by these contemporaneous apparatus-revealing images, which provided both the advertiser and the reader with fleeting, shadowy visions of the artifice behind the artifice — a world of illusion without end.

***

MORE ENTHUSIASM at HILOBROW

Grok My Enthusiasm (33)

Categories

Tags