THE NEW LOOK:

FROM THE CLUB KID to the rich kid, athleisure to the luxury watch, fashion photography has always had a voracious eye. It’s this rapaciousness that might describe all photographic images today—that sea of indiscriminate data, of branding-as-content. But the art world has never quite known what to do with fashion photography. Even though the age-old categories of “art” and “commercial” image production may seem obsolete, the distinctions are still surprisingly rigid. Photography may be post-Pictures and post-Internet, but it can’t seem to get over its neurotic relationship to advertising, with surprisingly few artists traversing those domains—and those who do often keeping the bodies of work distinctly separate, or even secret.

And yet it’s fashion photography that has served as a testing ground for the visual itself—for new means of postproduction, for the massive dissemination of imagery, for the picture as social media. Fashion photography might represent the most radical surrender of conventional authorial control to endless teams of people, to a vast multiplicity of pages, screens, streams of content. Here, Artforum highlights the work of those who have gone furthest to investigate and inhabit this world of extremity. “Photography is bound to time in precisely the same way as fashion,” Siegfried Kracauer once wrote; today, that peculiar speed and scale show us the future of the image.

VIVIANE SASSEN

SHEA SPENCER

PHILIP-LORCA DICORCIA

MARK BORTHWICK

MICHELE ABELES

OLU ODUKOYA

COLLIER SCHORR

HEJI SHIN

DAVID SIMS

RYAN MCGINLEY

ROE ETHRIDGE

PETRA COLLINS

LAURIE SIMMONS

JOSEPHINE PRYDE

PETER LINDBERGH