Fashion
From Seenoevil
Various contemporary fashion photographers combine violence and sexuality in their imagery, treading the fine line between fashion and obscenity. Presumably they can afford good lawyers.
Fashion photographers publish in mediums which reach a far wider audience than photographers who may be defined by the proposed law as 'extreme pornographers' could ever dream. Furthermore, fashion photographers are advertisers. Pornography is often consumed as an end in itself (satisfying a desire to look, rather than arousing a desire to act), but fashion photographers produce images in order to openly promote products and the lifestyle aspirations that accompany them.
Nevertheless it would be difficult to argue that there is not something productive about the controversy and debate inspired by the photographers listed below.
If the law is enacted, will it be necessary to ban the possession of their works in the name of legal consistency - or should we reserve special privileges for beautiful people...?
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Steven Meisel
State of Emergency by Steven Meisel in Italian Vogue, September 2006
"Steven Meisel's fashion photographs, published in the current issue of Italian Vogue, take the pornography of terror to another extreme."
Guy Bourdin
"The perverse esthetecization of violence, however, is Bourdin's most distinctive calling card. He's known for depicting women tied up, compromised—or dead."
David Lachappelle
Steven Klein
"There’s a guilelessness to Klein’s disconnected, inchoate talk about his work that suggests that many of his recurring visuals—bondage, claustrophobic interiors, spilled blood, implied violence—emerge, unfiltered, from his subconscious."
Erwin Olaf
Izima Kaoru
"Since 1993 the Japanese photographer Izima Kaoru has been creating scenes of sophisticated violence and enchanting horror. Landscapes with a Corpse is the title of his project. He invited actresses and models to reveal to him their fantasies about a perfect death: above all he asked them which designer clothes they would like to wear when they died. And so the photos that show the crime scene (or that of natural death) do not allude to something fatal and irreversible but a kind of elegant and highly aesthetic ceremony."
