Aleksandra Klimczak
My most recent work sets out to question the perception of lived experience in society. Fashion is often associated with consumption, desire and excess but I am using photography to critically engage with these notions. By adopting a similar aesthetic and the visual codes familiar to advertising, my magazine Rage engages with questions of sustainability and ethics. My work also reflects intimate engagements with people I work with, resulting in a unique style of portraiture. Although I see this work as highly personal, it is also designed for editorial magazines and advertising. My diverse practice is equally at home in both studio and location settings.
Rage
It is clear that we cannot continue to consume the planet's resources and ignore the damage to our environment. Being eco-friendly is difficult for consumer societies particularly in relation to fashion and the clothing industry where most production processes are harmful to the planet in one way or another. In order to be considered eco-friendly (‘not environmentally harmful’) every part of industrial processes, production, as well as packaging, cannot be harmful to the environment. Can we commit to reducing the use of products that are harmful to the environment by refusing to buy or support products that we do not meet ecological standards and do not exploit workers in the poorest countries in the world? Is it possible or indeed can we make it desirable to reuse and upcycle fashion garments and accessories? We can only slow down the deterioration of the planet if we control our desires and decrease consumption.
In this edition, we draw attention to fashion and glamour products that we use daily without considering how harmful they are for the environment. The production for this edition was stopped suddenly with the global spread of Covid-19. The outbreak of the virus has profoundly changed all our lives. In line with this new reality features produced for the magazine necessarily adopted a DIY aesthetic.
In my dissertation I decided to focus on a now iconic image from the Calvin Klein advertising campaign for the fragrance Obsession for Men in 1993. My critical reading includes classic texts on the semiotic analysis of advertising images as well as the use of social semiotics in designing as well as critiquing marketing and brand strategies. The image at the centre of my research is a black and white photograph of the model Kate Moss, lying unclothed on her front on a couch, and is one of many taken by the then model and now established fashion photographer Mario Sorrenti. In 2017, unpublished images from that time were selected and used for two new fragrance campaigns, Obsessed for men and Obsessed women. In media interviews, Moss’ account of long hours under Sorrenti's instruction to find and hold poses, the couch photograph included, complicated the brand’s young love in paradise narrative that was crucial to the original publicity in 1993. I balance my analysis of the visual and textual codes in fragrance advertising with an account of how a semiotics of scent is used to encode the language of perfume.
Photobook
In this inaugural edition of Rage magazine, we explore the urgent question of how to live our lives in a more compassionate, egalitarian and ecologically sensitive way. This is particularly important in light of the current pandemic and the closure of fashion production lines, retail outlets and numerous cultural institutions.