Essay on Has Fashion Photography Gone too Far?

The fashion industry has a considerable impact on the contemporary society but fashion photography often raises highly controversial issues in an attempt to reveal female sexuality and to attract the audience’s attention. In this regard, it is possible to refer to the fashion photography depicting a police officer detaining a woman and conducting search in a sexually explicit and offensive way. The image is highly controversial in regard to women and police officers but, at the same time, the image reveals the general trend of the contemporary fashion industry to placing emphasis on the sexuality of women to attract their attention to products advertised in mass media. However, such policy is definitely erroneous because it is offensive and leads to the formation of the inferior image of a woman in the contemporary society. In this regard, the image stresses female sexuality in an offensive way, while the involvement of police officers makes the image even more controversial. In such a situation, the image cannot be released in its present form without editing. In fact, it is possible to recommend changing the concept of the image to make it neutral in relation to women and the police, although such neutrality may affect the effectiveness of the image and decrease its advertising power. Nonetheless, the image should be edited to prevent its offensive impact on women and police officers, while its creators could have used a different way to attract the attention of the audience.

The controversy of the image

The image raises highly controversial issues affecting both women and police officers. In fact, the fashion photography has gone too far and the image cannot be released without editing or total change of the concept of the image because of the negative depiction of women as being totally inferior to men. In actuality, the fashion industry tends to the inferior depiction of women stressing their sexuality and turning them into mere commodities (Barringer, 43). In fact, emphasis on female sexuality is traditional for fashion photography but the female sexuality should not exceed existing ethical and social norms. Fashion photography should not turn women into mere commodities and subjects to the sexual aggression from the part of men. Instead, fashion photography should stress female sexuality in a less offensive way. At any rate, the photography should put men and women on the equal ground instead of slipping to the male domination ”“ female subordination relationships. Such relationships are too conservative and supremacist and, therefore, unacceptable in the contemporary society and fashion industry.

On the other hand, the involvement of police officers raises the negative response of the public since the image depicts police officers rather as offenders than law enforcement agents. In this regard, the involvement of policy officers in fashion photography and mass media depiction at large was always highly controversial (Orecklin, 105). In fact, the involvement of police officers is quite unusual for fashion photography since the fashion industry focuses on both men and women but police officers normally stay aside of the attention of fashion designers and photographers. In addition, the involvement of police officers in fashion photography can raise ethical and legal issues. In case of the photo under discussion, the involvement of police officers is quite offensive for them because police officers are depicted in the act of a sexual aggression against a woman, who is detained and searched. Obviously, such depiction of police officers does not meet ethical standards of police officers’ conduct.