Output details

Playing for the camera

This chapter engages with an emerging field that examines the various ways that affect (emotional and/or bodily involvement with images) operates within the domain of fashion photography. It investigates the trope of the technologically ‘colonised’ body to suggest that the idea of an ‘affect economy’ can be seen in nascent form in fashion photography as early as the 1930s. Shinkle asks how can the emergence of the playful body in fashion photography be thought in terms of embodied and affective relations to photographic technologies? She uses Johan Huizinga’s concept of play as a socially meaningful form to examine the playful body as a signifier, emblematic of a newly emancipated female subject. She goes on to suggest that pace Huizinga, play is bound up in complex ways with technology. Extending and developing Huizinga’s notion of ‘lower order play’, Shinkle shows how visual technologies have encouraged new forms of play – dynamic interactions with the camera, expressions of vitality that invite the viewer to experience the fashion image as a ‘mode of feeling’. This paper is part of Shinkle’s recent body of work on the interaction of the fashioned body with visual technologies (which includes her essay ‘Fashion’s Digital Body’, REF Output 3). It extends theoretical models typically used in other fields (i.e. game theory, videogame theory), to the discussion of a particular moment in the history of fashion photography – the shift, in the 1930s, from static posing to more mobile, active ideals of femininity. It argues that ‘playing’ for the camera was part of an emergent economy of affect in which the body acted as a site for the channelling and modulation of affect by technological means. It suggests that fashion photography of this period marks the early stages of a general trend away from ‘reading’, and towards ‘feeling’ images.