Commercial photography

1. Read and translate the text. What is the main idea of the text?

2. Find unknown terms and words in the text and give their translations?

A modern designer came into being as an intermediary between industry and a consumer. His role is to adapt the products of industry to the mass market, to make them more useful and durable, perhaps, but at the same time to make them more appealing and commercially successful. Commercial success is the touchstone of achievement in design, although designers in different cultures have often taken different views as to how the achievement is measured or the success validated.

Commercial photographic images are a major ingredient of our visual life, assimilated from magazines, hoardings and such contexts as brochures, catalogues, calendars, packaging and point-of-sale promotional material. Commercial photography thrives as a means of creating highly polished images of a stylized, glamourized and idealized view of the world in order to sell a product or a service.

The major category of commercial photography is advertising in its countless guises, including product photography and photo-illustration, fashion, beauty and certain categories of photography which are neither reportage nor aspire to be fine art, yet which can be fascinating social documents of considerable aesthetic quality.

In the sixties the profession of commercial photography and, in particular, fashion photography became greatly glamourized: the successful young photographer became a popular folk hero, as if the camera was a passport to the illusory world. Among the most interesting magazines to be launched in the sixties, the photography of which captured the youthful excitement of that period, were “The British Nova” which commissioned some of the best fashion photography of its day, and “The German Twen brilliantly Art” directed by Willy Fleckhaus.

Today the reverse seems true, a character of many magazines is dictated by the market needs of advertisers and many photographers become the greater restrictions of these imposes. The seventies and eighties have, nonetheless, brought forth a new roll-call of a talent. Outstanding contemporary figures include Helmut Newton and Guy Bourdin, who have dominated the field of fashion photography; Hans Feurer, Arthur Elgort, Denis Piel and others talented fashion photographers; advertising and glamour photographers such as Francis Giacobetti, James Baes and others.

Commercial photographers play a great role in our consumer society, creating the images of a life-style to which we are constantly encouraged to aspire. They create glamourized images of women and give a heightened visual appeal to the products which are economic mainstay of our society.

During the twentieth century, both fine art photography and documentary photography became accepted by the art world and the gallery system. At first, fine art photographers tried to imitate painting styles. This movement is called pictorialism, often uses soft focus for a dreamy and romantic look. In reaction to that, Weston, Ansel Adams, and others formed “The Group” to advocate “straight photography”; the photograph as a (sharply focused) thing in itself and not an imitation of something else.

3. Answer the following questions:

1. Did the modem designer come into being as an intermediary between industry and a consumer?

2. What are the major categories of commercial photography?

3. What role did commercial photographers play in consumer society from the 60s -70s?

4. What did fine art photographers try to do at first?

5. What is pictorialism?

4. Ask your groupmates to find answers in the text.

5. Discuss the content of the text in the form of a dialogue.