POSE

In previous centuries, portrait painting abused the pose as a way to convey a character’s grandeur and highlight the face of a time-defying beauty.

Its motivations are beauty, style, and the essence of fashion.

With the decline of print editorials, this type of photography is now as free as the pictures on Instagram, and can compel an audience to like, share, and personalize it endlessly.

Despite the disruptive nature of fashion photography, if you want to make a living in Mexico as an editorial fashion photographer, your images will inevitably end up being “vanilla.”

Clear-cut images of happy, rich, white models on a yacht, on the beach, or in the trendiest neighborhoods, with an imagination as limited as a soap opera.

A form of indoctrination dictates that these are the images that the audience, the media, and brands want to see.

Fashion photography differs from its peers: it is more like a demiurge. Rather than being a collector of moments, it is the Dr. Frankenstein directing the scene: the styling, fashion, lights, makeup, and models.

The artist is collaborative, creating aesthetic constructions in which the pose and the artifice appear as Photoshop layers.

In these images, each accessory and embellishment is created in the laboratory. Images of bodies in staged scenes are created, not in a strictly three-dimensional space, but on a computer screen.

The stage and the body come together in fashion, transgressing the conventional in search of beauty in what is exceptional, unique, and different.

What differentiates it is that it is not the traditional image of fashion, even when it appears to be. Instead, it is a different way of interpreting the body as an aesthetic in its own right, qualified by the fashion that is used, and seen through the identity it is given by the staged scene around it.

Fashion photography constantly offers new ways to approach beauty.

Today, plenty of images rebel against established “white beauty” to construct identities, describe brands, and renew worldviews.

Photography is used as a way to construct new, unique, and exceptional bodies, and fashion allows us to see these other body images as beautiful. Just a few years ago, these models would never have been included on catwalks, but now it is almost impossible to imagine the 21st century without semi-shaved heads and brightly colored hair.

The most interesting fashion photography in Mexico tends to be urban; the rural landscape is rarely portrayed.

Curiously, the younger generation of fashion photographers, brought up among screens in the digital era, does not appreciate open-air fashion, and the commonplace prevails over rustic elements in their images.

One common location that has been badly managed by Mexican fashion film and photography is that of the “abandoned ranch,” perpetuating the “popular” construct historically imposed by the elites.

Through the corselet reminiscent of Mr. Pearl, the cloud over the face in the style of Yamamoto, and the sexy body image prohibited in the 19th century, the tattoos point to the truth: piercings, scratches, and compresses are the essence of the digital body.

Internet culture has had a huge impact on fashion photography, moving it from the pages of magazines to purely online publications, with one eye on websites and the other on Instagram.

The fluidity of online images has affected the depictions of identity generated in fashion photography.

And now there are images reclaiming the aesthetic of former subcultures.

A set of new identities is also being created, such as “kawaii” in Asia—put simply, the “cute” aesthetic.

Mass popular culture is founded in fashion. Innovation is derived from what happens on the street in fleeting, everyday occurrences, and is no longer the reserve of exclusive salons and stuffy gala events.

Ren and Stimpy, Cow and Chicken, and the villain known as “HIM” in The Powerpuff Girls: the attitude of the rascal or trickster must be adopted in order to live (well) in the on-screen world.

Young photographers take innovative shots as a result of their more varied visual worldview: classical art, famous photos, and pop culture.

There are images that remind us of Norman Rockwell or the Mona Lisa, but in a 21st century incarnation.