CENTRAL SAINT MARTINS: BLINK / ANNA FOX / MA FASHION

In January 2016, MA Fashion commissioned acclaimed British photographer Anna Fox to document the building of the final year collections. Over a two-month period, Fox engaged in fieldwork that reveals the process of fashion design at close quarters; in its purest, almost abstract form. It takes us from first fittings to line-up; from Granary Building in King’s Cross to London Fashion Week at 180 Strand.

Working in collaboration with Google Arts & Culture, Fox used their latest technologies including the incredibly high resolution Art Camera. These screen-based image captures complement the large format photographic prints on display.

Anna Fox (b.1961) is one of the most celebrated British photographers of the last thirty years. Working in colour, Fox first gained attention for Work Stations: Office Life in London (1988), a study of office culture in Thatcher's Britain. Her publications include Cockroach Diary and My Mother's Cupboards and My Father's Words (2000), autobiographical narratives designed as miniature books. Anna Fox Photographs 1983 - 2007, was published by Photoworks in 2007. Fox’s solo shows have been seen at Photographer’s Gallery, London, Museum of Contemporary Photography, Chicago amongst others and her work has been included in international group shows including How We Are: Photographing Britain at Tate Britain. She was shortlisted for the 2010 Deutsche Borse Photography Prize.

This footage of the MA Fashion show finale at London Fashion Week was taken using the Google Jump camera. It is a camera rig that uses 16 GoPro 360 cameras. The Jump camera system has three parts: firstly the camera rig, secondly, software that automatically assembles and processes the footage, and thirdly, a player.

Footage simultaneously captured on the multiple cameras is assembled to create stereoscopic 3D film by recreating the scene being captured but also generating thousands of in-between viewpoints as well.

These images were taken using the Google Art Camera, a device created to photograph artworks from museums around the world to archive them for posterity. It is a custom-built robotic camera that can produce ultra-high resolution gigapixel (over 1 billion pixels), revealing details otherwise invisible to the naked eye.

The camera was originally developed for capturing flat, two-dimensional images, such as painting. It works by photographing in section, moving from one small detail to the next. Laser and sonar help the camera focus by measuring the artwork's distance using high-frequency sound. By taking hundreds of close-up, high-resolution images, Google's software stitches the images together to create a seamless, digital copy.