Fashion in Flux: The Language We Wear

In 1826 or 1827 Nicéphore Niépce first fixed an image captured with a camera, after an exposure of at least eight hours. His associate Louis Daguerre developed the daguerreotype, the first photographic process to be publicly announced and commercially viable; its details were made public in Paris in August 1839. Later materials cut exposures from minutes to seconds, and then to a fraction of a second. Labels may name how a print was made: the gelatin silver print is the most common process in black-and-white photography, and a chromogenic print, or C-print, is a colour print made from a colour negative, a transparency, or a digital image. A photograph is not always taken at the moment the shutter meets the scene. For Landscape Sublime (2013–), Anastasia Samoylova printed stock landscape images from the internet, built them into collages in her studio, and photographed them again; for Image Cities (2021–2022) she used telephoto lenses, reflections, and spatial compression to layer advertising, buildings, and passers-by into dense compositions.

Choose one photograph, take in the whole frame, then step closer and look at its edges: what did the photographer keep inside the frame, and what was left out?

Was this picture taken in a single moment on the spot, or was it arranged, or photographed a second time?

• Vanitas 虛空畫→Contemporary photography also borrows the vanitas tradition, picturing things that are vanishing, decaying, or running out.