von Unwerth's new book, Fräulein, features women. Though she shoots models and celebrities in states of undress — often bare-breasted — there's always a certain elegance, a wink, an element of fantasy — and not the irritating, trying-too-hard kind, manufactured by Victoria's Secret.

Morris asks: "As a female, are you allowed greater access in your approach to erotica? (For example, would the same photos taken by a man be seen as objectification?)"

Ellen von Unwerth: I never felt this to be a problem.

Interesting. As a fan of her photography, I've always felt that the unsaid truth — these are women posing for a woman — filtered through to the viewer. But I can't say why. Maybe it's because I know the photographs are being shot by a woman? Or maybe it's because the women in the pictures seem so unfettered, and not self-conscious? A review from the Independent puts it this way:

The great quality here is that the power belongs to the subject - any fantasy projected is ultimately her own. To be allowed a glimpse into her world feels like a privilege.

But maybe the reason von Unwerth's photography never seems exploitative or forced is because she used to be a model. She tells Morris:

I hated modeling and felt uncomfortable not being able to move, and do silly things in front of the camera. So now I push my models to live and express themselves… I think the girls in my pictures are playful and they are having fun. I like to show their personality and charm, and not just their bodies. I also love when the picture tells a story.

So help me, I love it, too. I'd much rather see her shooting Vogue covers. Be sure and read the full interview, in which she spills that her shoots involve loud music and champagne. (And just FYI: you can look at all 450 pages of the $700 book here.)

Fräulein [Dazed Digital]
Ellen von Unwerth, Fräulein [Taschen]

Because, you know, what the world needs now is more lawsuits.

Schwarzenegger, himself a celebrity, has approved a measure which states that the rights of a free press "to report details of an individual's private life must be weighed against the rights of the individual to enjoy liberty and privacy." That sounds reasonable… or does it?

Magazines and blogs (like this one) buy pictures of stars everyday; how are we to know if the snapper was over Lindsay Lohan's property line or not? What if you were fined for clicking on an illegally obtained photo? What if you went to buy ice cream, and later found out that the ice cream you bought was stolen, and you were being sued by a rich person for eating it?

As Dionne Searcy writes for the Wall Street Journal:

Some legal experts… question whether the California law is enforceable. In general, it remains legal for individuals to take photographs of other people, as long as the photo is snapped in a public place. In many cases, they add, it can be difficult to determine where a photo was taken after the fact.

In addition, there's a concern that celebrities are getting special treatment. Your house is on Google Street View; journalists have the right to pursue a story by knocking on your door or photographing you on the sidewalk if you are, say, a dry-cleaner ripping off customers, a lottery winner or a suspected terrorist.

But a measure okaying lawsuits is really saying: Celebs! Go ahead and sue. You have money! The snappers and blogs and magazines will be sorry they fucked with you.

Look, I'm not saying it's right to jump a hedge to get exclusive picture of someone's backyard wedding. Laws should not be broken. But taking a magazine or blog to court and fining them as much as $50,000 for not knowing that shot is illegal doesn't seem right either.

A New California Law Places Paparazzi Under The Spotlight [WSJ]

[Sydney, October 22. Image via Getty]

SYDNEY, AUSTRALIA - OCTOBER 22: Photographs are seen during an exhibition to showcase 150 local artists in Glebe on October 22, 2009 in Sydney, Australia. The exhibition runs for a month with the lifesize portraits displayed in a variety of outdoor locations in Glebe. (Photo by Brendon Thorne/Getty Images)

[London, September 28. Image via Getty]

A woman looks at a work of art entitled 'Historic Photographs' which forms part an exhibition of work from six decades by artist and activist Gustav Metzger ' Gustav Metzger: Decades 1959�2009' at the Serpentine Gallery, in central London, on September 28, 2009. Metzger's work represents a life-long involvement in left-wing politics, ecology and the creative and destructive powers of 20th and 21st century industrialised societies. The exhibition runs from September 29 to November 8, 2009. AFP PHOTO/GEOFF CADDICK (Photo credit should read Geoff Caddick/AFP/Getty Images)

"I have never yet seen, and you probably never will see, a fashion or beauty picture that hasn't been retouched. Unfortunately, we are living in a retouched world."

— photographer Derek Hudson, who says he would "make a stink" if an editor Photoshopped his pictures.

"When teenagers and women look at these pictures in magazines, they end up feeling unhappy with themselves… If people knew they had to describe what they had altered, it might make them less likely to do it. These photos can lead people to believe in realities that very often, do not exist."

— Jo Swinson, a British member of Parliament from the Liberal Democratic Party, which wants to ban altered photos entirely in ads aimed at children under 16.

"I spent the first 10 years of my career making girls look thinner. I've spent the last 10 making them look larger."

— Robin Derrick, creative director of British Vogue.





Lifting the Veil of Mere Pixel Perfection [NY Times]

Earlier: France Proposes "Health Warning" Label On Photoshopped Images
British Lawmakers Take Stand Against Photoshop
Here's Our Winner! 'Redbook' Shatters Our 'Faith' In Well, Not Publishing, But Maybe God
The Annotated Guide To Making Faith Hill 'Hot'
Faith Hill's 'Redbook' Photoshop Chop: Why We're Pissed

For years, the identity of the "elevator girl" remained a mystery. Frank's image was published in his most famous book, The Americans, which included a preface written by his friend Jack Kerouac. Of this image, Kerouac wrote:

"That little ole lonely elevator girl looking up sighing in an elevator full of blurred demons, what's her name & address?"

Although Kerouac's influence helped bring The Americans to a much wider audience, his question remained unanswered until around 10 years ago, when Sharon Goldstein, now known as Sharon Collins, found herself drawn to an image housed in the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art. "I stood in front of this particular photograph for probably a full five minutes, not knowing why I was staring at it," Sharon said, in an interview with NPR. "And then it really dawned on me that the girl in the picture was me."

At the time the photograph was taken, Collins was 15, working a summer job as an elevator girl in the Sherry Frontenac Hotel. While "all the other kids were going off to summer camp," Collins was working to support her family. She claims she does not remember Frank and his camera, although she wishes she could. After she came forward as the girl in the image, she was able to piece together what happened from Frank's negatives, which shows several candid shots, followed by another group of pictures, where Collins grins and poses. But Frank picked this enigmatic image for his book. Collins has finally decided to come forward and out herself as the subject of the picture, on the 50th anniversary of the publication of The Americans.

As for Kerouac's analysis of the photograph, which pinpoints a quiet loneliness in the anonymous young face, Collins says:

"He saw in me something that most people didn't see. I have a big smile and a big laugh, and I'm usually pretty funny. So people see one thing in me. And I suspect Robert Frank and Jack Kerouac saw something that was deeper. That only people who were really close to me can see. It's not necessarily loneliness, it's ... dreaminess."

Robert Frank's Elevator Girl Sees Herself Years Later [NPR]
The Americans [Amazon]

Annie Leibovitz has taken some of the most famous images of our time, and her name is still a byword for prestige photography, both glam and artistically credible. As the longtime partner of Susan Sontag, she occupied the rareified echelon of "respectable supercouple." As the in-depth story by New York magazine's Andrew Goldman tells it, she was generally thought to pull down astronomical fees for Vanity Fair and Vogue and be well-set with royalties, to say nothing of her successes in NYC real estate. In short, in a lot of ways she seemed like a definition of modern success.

It's always confusing when people who are really rich - or could be - go bankrupt. How do they manage it? We think. Sure, it's well known that Leibovitz struggled with addiction for years - being Rolling Stone's head photographer in its heyday couldn't have helped - and she's also a notorious perfectionist, whose shoots are legendarily expensive. But still, she wasn't someone purely at the mercy of the market's vagaries, but someone talented, and with her drug habit licked and what seemed like a stable family life, this level of excess just feels...confusing. Well, as the article details, she was just a bad businesswoman: extravagant, imprudent, generous, stubborn, alternately greedy and unworldly, and bad about getting maximum money from her achievements. She was also one of many who lived on credit and didn't expect it all to come crashing down. Says Goldman,

It's impossible to account for all of Leibovitz's line-item expenses, but as surprising as it may be to outsiders, she was clearly spending beyond her means. One close associate of Leibovitz's theorizes that she identified too much with her subjects. "Photographers aren't professional athletes, recording artists, or supermodels," the source says. "Compared to 99 percent of the world, she makes a vast fortune. The problem occurs when a person becomes so famous that they start feeling that they're more in line financially with Oprah or Madonna."

Um, okay, but to the rest of us, that hardly cuts it. She still had much, much more money than even the average celebrity photographer. And $24 million in debt is hard to rack up. So there's the usual incredulity that accompanies these stories of excess. But in this case, maybe there's more: there's a disappointment that's actually quite unfair and has nothing to do with Annie Leibovitz the actual person. I would never have realized it before all this, but Leibovitz was someone whose life I sort of looked up to. Not just for the work, but because, if I'd stopped to analyze it, she seemed to have it figured out. Even in the tragic aftermath of losing her partner, she seemed like a definition of true success, someone who seemed to have the magic combo of artistic and financial symbiosis. And I'm sure, in some way, her sex and her sexuality played into this: she was someone who'd earned the right to live as she wanted, and as such she was an inspiration and a pioneer. That's unfair of course, as all such un-asked-for pressures are: Leibovitz was, I guess, allowed to be as bad with money and extravagant and cut off from normal concerns as any rich person. I know this, and yet I feel an extra disappointment: another one bites the dust. Another person whom we didn't know, but whom we decided to project onto as a sign that it could be done, is fallible in the same way so many people are. And money's no security from anything.

How Could This Happen to Annie Leibovitz? [New York]

Most of Amber Rose's Complex shoot, which was photographed by Matt Doyle, refers to iconic shots of Grace Jones. The image of Amber with jewelry in her mouth, for example, is a recreation of this picture of Grace eating diamonds, as photographed by Gordon Munro for Interview in the '80s:

There's Amber smoking in a tux…

And Grace smoking in a tux, on the cover of her 1981 album, Nightclubbing.

There's Amber in a cropped grey tee, with boxing hand wraps…

And Grace, on the cover of her '82 single "Pull Up To The Bumper," wearing a cropped grey tee and boxing tape.

There's Amber, her naked body covered in oil, posing with a whip…

And Grace, her naked body covered in oil, with a whip.

Perhaps most offensively, there's Amber in a cage.

And Grace in a cage.

The French artist Jean-Paul Goude shot that last image of Jones; the two were involved in a tempestuous and sometimes violent relationship. The objectification and exoticization of black women isn't incidental to Goude's art: it's the whole point. "Blacks are the premise of my work," the artist told People in 1979, "I have jungle fever."

In case anyone thought that was a joke, Jungle Fever was also the title of Goude's 1982 book. The shot of a caged Jones made the cover.

So it's no surprise that Goude shot Jones surrounded by raw meat, under a sign that reads "DO NOT FEED THE ANIMAL." But why would Complex choose to emulate images, some of which come across as not just dated, but riven with deep and troubling statements about black women as animalistic, primitive, and uncivilized creatures? Latoya Peterson has noted of such pictures that the women are always "looking like they are ready to fly off the page and attack." Claire Sulmers of The Fashion Bomb says of the Complex photos the message is that "these women are so wild they must be caged–they're sultry, snarling sex beasts."

Modeling opportunities for women of color in general are slim; as we know, far too many designers consider diversity on the runway and in their advertising to be entirely optional. The industry's slowness in even inviting black models to the metaphorical table is probably why, thirty years on, Grace Jones remains the most easily identifiable short-haired black model, and therefore a ready subject with which for Complex to associate the close-cropped, bi-racial Amber Rose. (Imagine if Jerry Hall were still considered the only and ultimate blonde model, or Paulina Porizkova were still the touchstone brunette, and white models starting their careers were constantly booked on jobs that recreated exclusively those women's old spreads.)

The industry's general unwillingness to embrace models of color as anything besides the exoticized "other" is thwarting the development and popularization of other kinds of black beauty. Even Alek Wek, the Sudanese supermodel, noted that she was often asked to pose in spreads that she felt fitted into a wider and more troubling tradition of black people's representation in the mainstream media, particularly with regard to a Lavazza calendar where she posed inside a coffee cup, her skin intended to represent the espresso. As Wek wrote in her memoir, "I can't help but compare them to all the images of black people that have been used in marketing over the decades. There was the big-lipped jungle-dweller on the blackamoor ceramic mugs sold in the '40s; the golliwog badges given away with jam; Little Black Sambo, who decorated the walls of an American restaurant chain in the 1960s; and Uncle Ben, whose apparently benign image still sells rice."

It's worth noting that in re-creating these pictures, Complex did tone them down; gone are the chains from the whip photo, and so too is the raw meat and the sign explicitly referring to the model as an animal in the cage photo. The choices the Complex art director made are almost certainly intended to mitigate the offense of the original images; we've come at least some way as a society since Jean-Paul Goude's day. But how long will it be before we automatically recognize any picture of a black woman caged up like an animal as offensive?

Amber Rose [Complex]
Caged Black Women: Amber Rose & Grace Jones [The Fashion Bomb]
When Disco Queen Grace Jones Lamented 'I Need a Man,' Artist Jean-Paul Goude Prowled Too Near Her Cage [People]
Darker Skinned Glamour Girls [Racialicious]
Bitter Coffee [NY Post]

Earlier:
How Did New York Fashion Week's 116 Shows Treat Models Of Color?

Lillian Bassman was a prominent fashion phographer from the 40s- to the early 60s' -New York's "Mad Men" heyday, in a time when women stars were rare. As a profile in today's Times explains, working with Harper's Bazaar, Bassman brought a new aesthetic to editorial work that came, she says, from the fact that models didn't have to play to men when they worked with her, and as such the sexuality she showcased was softer, more natural, more comfortable. Her commercial advertising work was equally influential: whereas lingerie photography had centered around a "pharmeceutical aesthetic" that emphasized underpinnings' ability to bind and correct, Ms. Bassman made it something sexy. As the Times puts it, "In place of heavy-set women constraining themselves in what was essentially equipment, Ms. Bassman deployed immeasurably lithe models, conveying a world in which women seemed to linger in the pleasures of their own sensuality. In her eye the undergarment emerges as a wardrobe unto itself, as if anything else in a woman's closet were simply an imposition."

While mentally one might add "for good or ill" this contradiction - of on the one hand creating an aesthetic that arguably imprisons women to this day, and on the other, emphasizing female sexuality - is characteristic of Bassman's career. Her famous decision to destroy her photographic archive in the 1970s is the most obvious example of this. Having devoted her career to documenting and creating an image of sophisticated adult womanhood, she was dismayed by what she perceived as the girlish fashions of the mod era and, later, the heavy-handed sexuality of the later decade. She also disliked the egos and demands of the new breed of supermodel, which ran counter to her concept of photographer as creator. In an act of both defiance and mourning, then, she destroyed the bulk of her negatives and threw the rest into a garbage bag in the garage.

What might be seen as reflexive conservatism is perhaps strange given Bassman's own history: while she may not have seen a place for herself in the new era of "liberation," her own history had been highly unconventional: with her immigrant parents' permission, she'd lived with her boyfriend from the age of fifteen, not marrying for ten years. Yet she disliked the trappings of the women's movement and apparently wanted no part of an industry she'd helped open to other women.

It's only recently, in her 90s, that her views have softened; as new technology has become available, Bassman's set about trying to resurrect some of her old images, using the discarded negatives and working with archived images and photoshop, a challenge she apparently enjoys. And there is a renewed interest in her work: the next year sees the publication of the book Lillian Bassman: Women
, two gallery shows and a retrospective in Germany. The exhibitions will feature her commercial work, her reworked images and some of her non-fashion photography.

In all these showcases, the focus is on the artist in relation to her primary subject, women. Which begs the question of her legacy as a female artist - and even a feminist. While she doesn't invite the debate to the same extent, in some ways Bassman's case provokes some of the same controversy as does Helen Gurley Brown's. Both were bold women succeeding on guts in a man's world - and, in giving the treatment of women a modern and feminine slant, still working essentially for the male gaze. More strikingly, both seemed more wedded to these compromises and an earlier, more glamorous vision of femininity, than in the gains they helped earn. There is certainly a case to be made as Bassman as stealth female advocate: as the Times puts it,

In the period dominated by Avedon and Irving Penn, Ms. Bassman was one of the few female photographers in the fashion business, and her work had a distinctly different cast from the outset, one less distancing. In most of the lingerie pictures, for example, the faces are averted or obscured, the result of the Ford agency's insistence that its models not be identifiable in such provocative advertising. The effect of this constraint is not cold anonymity but an unusual intimacy that leaves the images feeling almost entirely divorced from commodity, as if they were the visual entries in the personal journals of the women photographed.

But whatever the aesthetic triumphs, was the illusion of "divorce from commodity" altogether a positive thing? Now, I'm not saying this was Bassman's responsibility - she was a commercial photographer doing gorgeous work, and undoubtedly shot women with uncommon sensitivity. Her concerns, as is clear from her actions of the 1970s, were aesthetic. I pose it more to those who'd position her less ambiguously than she positioned herself. Her decision to sexualize lingerie, after all, and redefine its models as sexual objects - a triumph for feminine sensuality, perhaps, but can anyone claim this was a purely beneficial act? Especially given her contribution to narrowing aesthetic standards. Again, this is no criticism of her work, but merely questions that I think need be asked about any contributor to the popular aesthetic. At the end of the day, it seems pretty clear that Lillian Bassman would choose to be viewed as a photographer, and a professional - and I'm happy to pay her that compliment.

Femininity, Salvaged [NY Times]

One the one hand, you have children whose parents would like them to lead a somewhat normal life.

On the other hand, you have the government telling photojournalists — not paparazzi but news organizations — what they can and cannot publish.

According to Politico's Michael Calderone, the AP wouldn't put pre-approved White House photos of the girls' first day of school on the wire — the same way a newspaper wouldn't print a White House press release, verbatim. That's not journalism.

Recently, when President Obama caught sight of 8-year-old daughter Sasha on the White House's Truman Balcony, he waved, and she waved back, and photographers captured a "rare, unscripted" moment. White House officials apparently asked news organizations not to distribute the image. A few weeks later, President Obama took his daughters out for ice cream, and photographers were permitted to photograph them and use the images — a set-up photo op.

According to the AP:

The two events reflect both the First Family's insistence on raising their young daughters away from the spotlight of the White House and their penchant for carefully using them to bolster the president's political image.

"He's going to try to have it both ways until and unless people start to question his value system and his sincerity in playing that role," said Gerald Shuster, a political communications expert at the University of Pittsburgh.

It's tough to figure out what feels right in this situation. Of course there's a curiosity about the Obama daughters and how they live. Kids! In the White House! It's exciting. Then again, they shouldn't be followed by paparazzi or thrust into an unwanted spotlight.

But isn't it troubling how the President is trying to control the media? Because there's a responsibility to your children, and there's spin control and censorship. And we're lucky to live in a country with a free press, where the government doesn't control the media. Where do the President's rights end and the photojournalist's rights begin?

WH Restrictions For Daughters Rankle Photogs [Politico]
Earlier: Paparazzi Desperate For Photos Of First Daughters

[Image via The Official White House Flickr.]