Landmarks on look and feel

Here are some examples of the kind of work that I’ve been looking at recently as part of the research into my project. I think the work of Roman Sakovic and Tamas Dezso are worth putting together as they depict landscape in similar ways. There is a sense of detachment both in the pulled back position of the camera, the rigidly formal approach, and the use of desaturation that isolates the subjects from us. We look, clinically. The two are withdrawn surveys of landscape, its character, and its development; as beautiful as they are cold and alien.

Whilst Roman Sakovic’s work is as strong as Dezso’s, I find the variety of subject in the latter more compelling and I feel that my inquiry should not only be restricted to landscape but could also include interiors and portraits. There are telling details in everything but they just need to be united within a particular look and feel, as Deszo has so evocatively demonstrated.

Images from Tamas Dezso’s Here, Anywhere

Images from Roman Sakovich’s Transformation

Louis Vuitton: its journey from high street imitation to an accessory of the stars

Some fake Louis Vuitton handbags

You could imagine the problem the Louis Vuitton fashion house had a few years ago after everyone and their dog started buying imitations of their monogrammed bags from small traders up and down the country.

The problem that they had was the problem that Burberry had a few of years before; obviously high end fashion was never about the masses. Mass consumption of high end fashion ends its claim on exclusivity, and thus weakens its value. This wouldn’t normally be a problem to a brand with a distinctive brand identity to differentiate it, but when any brand has based its whole identity on simply being exclusive this will inevitably lead to something rather similar to a mid-life crisis; for the elite swanning around at Luis Vuitton this was a problem.

So what does a high end fashion brand who has lost its meaning do? It does what any cool-seeking teenager would do in its shoes: it goes and hangs out with the cool people at the coolest places and hopes that they’ll look a little bit cooler by association. Here are some excerpts from the campaign, which has rather ironically been titled ‘Core Values’:

Caption of the advert reads: "There are journeys that turn into legends. Bahama Islands, 10:07" (Sir Sean Connery for Louis Vuitton, shot by Annie Leibovitz)

Caption of the advert reads: "Inside every story there is a beautiful journey. Early evening, Buenos Aires, Argentina." (Sophia Coppola, Francis Ford Coppola shot by Annie Leibovitz)

Caption reads: "Some journeys change mankind forever" (Sally Ride, first American woman in space, Buzz Aldrin, first steps on the moon in 1969, Jim Lovell, commander of Apollo 13 shot by Annie Leibovitz)

As you can see for the past couple of years Louis Vuitton has been on a brand building adventure with some very carefully selected friends, who have all been photographed in some staged settings by Annie Leibovitz. The simple message from these adverts is that LV are a core part of the important and pivotal journeys that important people take in their lives, they are the a part of the modern day pioneer as they go through their ground-breaking trajectory etc.

What I find really interesting in this campaign is that from having a rather generic identity a couple of years ago, LV have used photography to explicitly pull their brand into the legends of modern day pioneers (nb: obviously for some of these celebs the term ‘pioneer’ is being used rather generously). This is spectacular myth-making at it’s finest. Who needs art when we have this out there already?!

However it is with regard to this myth-making that I find the recent advert for the campaign with Angelina Jolie slightly unsettling. Opening a magazine on my breakfast table this morning I was confronted with the following image, which had the caption “A single journey can change the course of a life. Cambodia, May 2011”. I think the question here is whether one can really use one’s adoption of a child from the developing world as the grounds to romanticise a lifestyle accessory?

Caption of the advert reads: "A single journey can change the course of a life. Cambodia, May 2011." (Anglina Jolie shot by Annie Leibowitz)