I’ve come across this item at a number of places now and I’m not quite sure whether to find this Vogue Italia fashion photospread, “State of Emergency’ by Steven Meisel, wryly amusing or a little sick.
I hope it’s meant to be transgressive, a satire on the current security theatre being staged by western governments and a protest against the contnuing erosion of human rights.
But think about where it’s published – Vogue is no samizdat rag. It’s a Conde Nast publication. Vogue exists to sell product for its intertainonal corporate advertisers – if it doesn’t make money, it’s gone.
I’d like to think Meisel’s intent was to comment on the increasing corporate invasion of aour personal and bodily privacy and particularly that of women’s bodies. But this photo-spread of degrading and humiliating images of women is also highly sexualised. It’s meant to be a turn-on and an homage to women’s prison porn, and ultimately to sell to as many consumers as possible.
My real problem with it is that if it’s in Vogue, it becomes an acceptable image, just as several of the Abu Ghraib pictures have. Even five years ago a major newspaper or news magazine would not have printed them, deeming them too extreme. Now such brutal images are common currency.
This is how, quietly, fascism becomes accepted as normality.
Read more: Fashion, Photography, Vogue Italia, Steven Meisel, Feminism, Fascism, Security Theatre, Agitprop, War on Terror.
