Saturday, January 17, 2009

Seven Photographs that Changed Fashion

I was watching Seven Photographs that Changed Fashion on BBC4 the other night - the idea being to get modern portrait and fashion photographer Rankin to recreate a number of iconic shots from the 30s through to the 80s. He usually works with digital cameras and did shoot most of his versions digitally, but often also with the same type of camera used for the original.

In most cases there wasn't a great deal of difference between the digital and film shots, except in the first photo he tried where the film version taken using an 8x10 plate camera was significantly different to the digital shot. Not in terms of composition, but the mood of the shot - interestingly the model commented that she found the film shots much less pressurised than the digital, and her expression in them is certainly more thoughtful.

You can see all the (digital versions) of the photos here. For some reason the programme's not available on iPlayer, but they are showing it several more times over the next week or so if you have BBC4 (and you get to look through lots of old viewfinders, which is always fun).

1 comment:

Shrig said...

Thanks for posting this, it was awesome. I love fashion (Vogue is my crack, as my roommates tell me). I want to go into fashion photography, which I know is hard but but not impossible. :)

Hope all is well, Claire.