The first steps looking into fashion photography I will be researching my own fashion photography timeline. This will allow me to look at the different styles, eras and techniques. I will then look into which fashion photographers I am interested in.

1830:(photography invented)

This was invented by Louis Daguerre with Joseph Nicéphore Niépce in 1839. He found that he was able to capture images with the camera obscura. Using asphaltum on a copper plate sensitised with lavender oil that required very long exposures. This process was unique and could not be reproduced. At the same time William Henry Fox Talbot was a British inventor and a pioneer of photography , he was in the process of making a calotype. The calotype created a negative image from which positives could be printed (onto silver chloride paper). This made the calotype superior in one aspect to the daguerreotype which only made one positive image (whereby it was difficult to get multiple copies). However it wasn’t till much later that fashion photography would take place.

1910: Baron de Meyer (1868 - 1946) was perhaps the first fashion photographer. He experimented with soft-focus lenses and back-lighting and his photographs have an overall grey key with the darker tones around the faces and arms. He was the first fashion photographer for vogue. Other magazines he photographed included Vanity Fair and Harper's Bazaar It is also thought that this style had an influence on early cinema.

1911: Edward Jean Steichen (1879-1973) founded the photo-secession group with Alfred Stieglitz In 1902. The group was dedicated to promoting photography as a fine art. His early photographs were influenced by his training as a painter. He first photographedfashion models in 1911 for the magazine "Art and Decoration" and worked with

Conde Nast during the twenties. He is considered the first modern fashion photographer. Was chief fashion photographer for vogue and Vanity Fair.

His style started with applying soft focus photography which helped to create fashion photography. However he soon revolutionized the field, banishing the gauzy light of the Pictorialist era and replacing it with the clean, crisp lines of Modernism. Steichen then took photos of gowns designed by couturier Paul Poiret.

He worked primarily with model Marian Moorehouse, wife of the poet E.E. Cummings, on several occasions. Steichen established the glamour of fashion photography. He delivered drama and sought out celebrities for portraits. He also developed studio lighting by adding side lights to a central key light. He uses simple props to create a stylish arrangement of forms, modernist in flavour, but classical in order and arrangement
He began by applying the soft focus style he had helped create to the photography of fashion. But soon he revolutionized the field, banishing th e gauzy light of the Pictorialist era and replacing it with the clean, crisp lines of Modernism. In the process he changed the presentation of the fashionable woman from that of a distant, romantic creature to that of a much more direct, appealing, independent figure.

Edward Jean Steichen also experimented with colour photography in 1904 and was one of the first people in the United States to use the Lumiere Aut ochrome process.

1920: Cecil Beaton (1904-1980) is one of the most celebrated British Portrait and fashion Photographers of the Twentieth Century and is renowned for his images of elegance, glamour and style. He was a photographer for the British edition of Vogue in 1931. Beaton is best known for his fashion photographs and society portraits.

( Nancy Beaton as a shooting star for the Galaxy Ball 1929)

He combined formality and fairy-tale glamour and was influenced by the appeal of Hollywood films. His main influence coming from his stage design and theatrical production.

Cecil Beaton is one of the most influential fashion and portrait photographers and lives on today within the work of many contemporary photographers including David Bailey and Mario Testino.

(Baba Beaton: A Symphony in Silver, 1925)