What is glamour
Some people will see glamour as mainly nude photography, also sometimes referred to as playboy style. Although I have to agree that for me playboy style can be fitted into the glamour category I don’t think that this is glamour perse. For me glamour is much broader. It contains everything from fully clothed to nudes, however with one thing in common, it has to be stylish. Glamour for me is better than reality. So one could say that everything I shoot is glamour because I do some work on the skin of my models, I do change the colors of the final image to a more pleasing one, I do use different light setups which are more pleasing for the models look etc.
However when I point out that a series is more glamour I always mean that these are images that contain a bit of “naughty” but in a good way. As many of you know we don’t do a lot of glamour in my work, mostly I love to focus on fashion, artists, beauty and shooting more crazy styling stuff. However I also love to go back to images that have something different and glamour for me is a sort of sidestep from my normal work that I love to do occasionally, playing with forms and expression is different in glamour from fashion and without a doubt a big challenge. In the past I hardly shot it because somehow it had no attraction to me because as a photographer you are somehow pushed into a corner with a big stamp on your head “wrong, ego etc.” and because I love my other work I also never had the need to explore glamour photography. When the workshops grew people more and more asked me to do glamour workshops and it took me some time to realize that maybe it would be fun to do the glamour workshops my way… meaning showing people that glamour does not mean top*less girls and flat light jumping around looking like they were ready to attack you and drag you down to the depths of you know what…..(sorry if I got carried away just now :D)
If you look at one of the replies by the way, that proves my point, just posting about glamour photography got my site banned from an UK schools network…. and I thought that I was always on the nice side :-), it has been corrected now by the way, thanks to the same reader.
For me glamour should have style, and yes of course there is a little bit of naughty in the images, you see a bit more than you normally do (however when I see certain fashion shots in vogue or shows on the catwalk I see more topless than I would ever shoot), the problem however is that if you try to aim for a broad audience you have to be careful, some people will not like to see anything less than a dress covering up everything, some people will have no problems with bathing suits but will freak when they see a lingerie shot, and some people will value photography for what it is. The artist interpretation of the subject he/she is visualizing (being it a painting or a photograph). When I teach workshops for example in a hotel setting a lot of people will ask me if the models will be wearing lingerie, and much to their surprise my answer is always (unless it’s a glamour workshop of course) “no of course not, it’s a fashion workshop”.
I think glamour has gotten a really bad reputation mainly due to the so called GWC (Guy With Camera) who only shoots to have girls in front of his camera that are nude, somehow I’m afraid that this overload of GWCs doing just that has given glamour a really negative vibe, to a point that when I teach I carefully select my images to include nothing that anyone could take offense to, in fact the image you see on top is probably the most glamour-ish shot I would use in a public slideshow of my work (and probably I would even not show this one). So is it a wrong image ? I don’t think so….
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