| COMB |

Following is a piece I wrote semesters ago for my history of photography class.

I know street style photographers have been around for years, and that this article needs a good dusting. I thought however it might be worth posting as I wait for things to heat up in London.

| | | | |

“The rise of abstract art and decorative design permitted the citizens of Western Europe to accustom their eyes to visions of themselves as shapes.” –Anne Hollander, Seeing Through Clothes

In late 2007 Colette, the European arbiter of cool, held an exhibition titled “From the Street to the Night” in her boutique/gallery in Paris. Compiled of work by a slew of younger photographers who prowl city streets around the world for shots of stylish denizens about town, the show proved a successful showcase of a genre Colette herself has christened social photography. Whether this “new” coinage is precise or appropriate with consideration to the established history and influence of street photographers like Henri Cartier-Bresson or Warhol’s “Factory Fotographer” Billy Name, there is indeed something novel about how the featured photographers were discovered and recognized through their own regularly updated photo blogs. Moreover, that they exclusively photograph in metropolitan milieus evokes a revamped vision of the twentieth-first century flaneur. Once characterized as a detached stroller/aesthete of the urban experience, Baudelaire’s “botanist of the sidewalk” now comes armed with a digital camera, a specialized interest (in this case, fashion), and the motivation to share his spontaneous encounters with the masses via Internet.

Scott Schuman’s rising popularity from his work on The Sartorialist is a particular testament to the blog’s effectiveness as a media channel. At thirty-nine, Schuman is slightly older than other photographers included in the Colette exhibit, and arguably more proficient. Street style bloggers often overlook the subtleties of a person’s dress, the small cares that make it artful, and instead zero in on the exhibitionism and uniform trendiness parading around only the hippest and youth-oriented of neighborhoods. But fifteen years in high-end fashion marketing and sales–not to mention a stint in college learning couture construction– have conditioned Schuman’s eyes to appreciate the most minute clothing details as well as the nuanced diversity of the people sporting them. His photographs have an innate element of double composition: the subject’s own composition of dress and Schuman’s subsequent composition of the subject. By first dissecting the relationship between photographer and his subjects, and then examining examples of his work, I will demonstrate how Schuman contextualizes his subjects through the aesthetic synthesis of dress and the urban landscape.

Part I: Man in the Masses

Artists have always acknowledged clothing as an extension of the expressive self. Even so, the Sartorialist’s committed eye to what he calls the “execution” of style distinguishes his images from traditional portraiture in which clothes are telling, but not necessarily primary to the composition. Yet his work is also at odds with the fashion editorial mode, where self-styling is rarely if ever the formal job of the model. In his fuzzy place between fashion and street photographer, Schuman’s shooting process is paradoxically systematic and instinctive, the photographic equivalent to bottling a butterfly to better study its wings:

“If I spot someone whose outfit I like I will maybe walk a half block behind him or her, and then try and stop him or her in a place that will make a good picture [. . .] I generally don’t pose them too much or move them away from the place that I stopped them. “

Confrontational yet open, the Sartorialist’s portraits are candid in terms of their spontaneity and formal in terms of his subjects’ self-conscious consent to be photographed. Who then are these people snagging Schuman’s lens?

His viewing public, mostly—men, women, and sometimes children who have grown up under the omnipresent snapshot camera, ever flattening their worlds to abstract forms possibly more familiar than reality. In Seeing Through Clothes, Anne Hollander describes how the camera’s invention altered people’s perception of themselves– and consequently their fashions– as the relatively warts-and-all realism of the photograph grew in popularity over careful hand renderings in other mediums. Fussy and precious clothes, once gloriously interpreted in paintings, conveyed a frumpy appearance on camera, giving rise to more streamlined, graphic silhouettes that better translated to film. “The quick impression, the captured instant, was the new test of elegance,” she says, and it continues to be so a century later. Schuman writes on his biography page: “My only strategy when I began the Sartorialist was to try and shoot style in a way that I knew most designers hunted for inspiration [ . . . ] abstract concepts of color, proportion, pattern mixing or mixed genres.”

At least to Schuman’s eye, the subjects featured on The Sartorialist have a developed sense of asserting themselves through snapshots. Whether such self-assertion correlates to their respective personalities is neither here nor there. Man’s reliance on visual information is too strong and the transformative effects of dress are too great to concretize each individual’s interior life solely by the clothes he or she wears. Shooting mostly strangers, Schuman characterizes dress first and foremost.

In a Slate Magazine piece about the street style phenomenon, Justin Shubow reminds us, “Not being documentarians or anthropologists, the [blog] editors end up revealing their own taste more than that of their locales.”

Schuman, who grew up in Indiana, has said he has no preconceptions when he goes out to shoot in order to be as open as possible to what he sees. But like all artists, he inevitably brands himself by the discrimination and editing required to finally produce work. The Sartorialist’s design layout is simple and innocuous as museum walls, but the blog’s chronological/diary format is especially revealing of the author’s existing and developing preoccupations. Schuman references American movies, old Hollywood stars Cary Grant and Fred Astaire, and iconic New York City locales including The Village Chess Shop and the former Fulton Fish Market. He commits a separate category to pictures of men and women on bikes, follows the hemlines of men’s trousers from cropped to puddling and back up again, and proves his eye for details with astute pronouncements like: “For me this shot is all about the silver cuff on his right wrist and the attitude of his cap.”

Regarding predecessors, it would be inaccurate to compare him to The New York Times’s street style photographer Bill Cunningham, whose mini-mosaic trend features in “Sunday Styles” are more clinical and deadpan than celebratory and optimistic. Jacques-Henri Lartigue, the artist who gave us his own exuberant account of photographs during the pre-war Belle Epoque in France, is perhaps one of the Sartorialist’s better antecedents in terms of a shared savoir-vivre style and compositional eye (see images below). Like the self-taught Lartigue, Schuman admits to having no training in photography beyond a love for the medium and years of unconsciously absorbing the fundamentals looking at countless fashion magazines. Perhaps it is this amateur, labor of love spirit that imbues his photos with their memorable down-to-earth enthusiasm and charm.

Yet interestingly enough, Schuman cites Bruce Weber, a photographer perhaps best known for his male nudes and provocative ads for lifestyle-based brands Calvin Klein, Ralph Lauren, and Abercrombie & Fitch, as a major influence. The merchandising precept move forward, don’t alienate the customer is clearly still alive in Schuman’s bones; otherwise his site wouldn’t be so rife with fans of his intriguingly coherent brand. Like a techie revival of the salon, each entry on The Sartorialist and other blogs includes a forum for viewers’ comments/gallery chatter. And when Schuman strays too far from his media recipe, readers rebuke him, as if spurned themselves.

One example concerns a candid shot from New Delhi in an entry captioned “Tough Way to Start Saturday Morning.” Taken inside a car, a small girl standing in traffic peers into one of its windows holding a cup for change. Clownish circles of rouge paint her cheeks and lips, indicating that she’s a begging performer, or worse, a child prostitute. On the blog, sandwiched between pictures of a smiling young Indian man and woman in bright “Western” style outfits, the girl’s photo comes off as incongruous and especially bleak. Her dress, obstructed by the car door, is the last thing one contemplates. One commentator wrote:

“First time in India? But not the first tourist guy impressed by the poverty. Billions of such pictures have been taken previously by tourists. So the questions are: Why was it necessary to take that picture? Why was it necessary to show that picture?”

“At the end of the day this blog is a visual diary of my life,” Schuman replied.

Whatever the response, the inclusion and controversy of the New Delhi photograph touches upon a final viewpoint fundamental to the blog. Although Schuman travels to cities around the world, including Stockholm, Florence, Milan, Paris, London, Hong Kong, Beijing, and New Delhi, global fashion, not exotica, is the point of interest. On his New Delhi trip he declared, “The last thing I want to do on this trip to India is water-down my eye and take a lot of touristy “exotic” pictures [. . .] I am really happy that so far I have found looks that I would shoot whether I was in NYC or Milan or anywhere.” If The Sartorialist is anything more than one man’s public visual diary, it is also an examination of chic sifted through a decidedly modern and industrial perspective.

Part II: Photographs

Like the sculptor Brancusi arranging a slab of wood already beautiful in it own right at a precarious angle, it is Schuman’s talent as a street style photographer to select and place visual elements of color, pattern, and texture in a person’s dress within the city structure. In “Flowers,” a creviced wall, sidewalk posts, a traffic queue, and building windows provide material orthogonals that emphasize the photo’s deep, atmospheric perspective. The austerity of the subject’s dark monochromatic clothes, linear haircut, and utilitarian backpack evoke a cool, urban warrior attitude, only intensified by his direct gaze and frontal posture. Juxtaposing his dress and the damp gray Paris street, the yellow-peach roses become a mysterious and ironic accessory. Is the bouquet a gift? Did he buy it himself? Why? The flowers are tenderly violent, like a color bomb, threatening to set off the young man’s blooming flush. If Schuman had photographed him under a different context—perhaps on sunny day against a bright wall– the flowers and the man’s black uniform would relate a very different narrative. For this reason it is important not to conflate the subject’s character with Schuman’s snapshot interpretation of his dress.

In contrast to “Flowers,” “Hugh F” has a very shallow perspective on a plain dark backdrop. The man’s grave expression, three-quarter profile, and weighty gesture call to mind the elements and detail of a Holbein portrait. In this low-key image, the abstract shapes each garment forms in shadow and highlight are compositionally as important as a whole garment’s relationship to another. The lit arc of his cap, for example, echoes the edge of his hollowed hood, while his sweatshirt’s swooping drapery draws us to the subject’s face and brilliant blue scarf. The scarf point in turn thrusts all focus to the man’s fist, dignified and dangerous in chunky silver rings. Schuman’s decision to crop the cityscape to a black ground forces viewers to pay particular attention to the energy and character of his subject’s dress. The decorative details and textures radiate power and respect.

The subject in “Cream Steps,” an elderly woman seated majestically with her head covered and her arms resting in her pockets, evokes in pose and presence comparisons to Whistler’s portrait of his mother in the painting “Arrangement in Gray and Black.” Like a light-hearted, frontal version of the masterpiece, the photograph presents a pleasing study of the subtle color harmonies and tonal variations of gray and ivory. Schuman’s marriage of woman and setting stages a witty portrait of her dress, which blends into the building like an established architectural feature in the façade. The curving stairway and three vertical columns impart an active, fragmented background that further accentuates the subject’s still and statuesque center composition. Only her good-natured smile and expressive gray eyebrows prevent her from wholly conceding to Schuman’s trick in his neo-classical depiction of her clothes.

Final thoughts:

In a recent issue of Bon Magazine, Linda Leopold recounts the collapse of Swedish fashion label J. Lindeberg, whose creator left the company in frustration after years of low profit margins and commercial pressures threatening his last bit of artistic control. She writes: “The J. Lindberg saga is a perfect example of the eternal conflict between art and commerce, credibility and money, creativity and business, dreamlike visions and tangible realism.”

For better or worse, the same could be said for The Sartorialist, except in this case I would describe the “eternal conflict” as an eternal convergence. What began as a recreational interest in the street has quickly risen to a media force Time Magazine names a “Top 100 Design Influencer.” In addition to penning a regular feature in GQ, Schuman now contributes photos and video footage to style.com, with whom he is in contract to cover the bi-annual fashion week mayhem in New York, London, Paris, and Milan. Schuman doesn’t shirk the prospect of being an industry leader. “I’m always really happy when I meet a designer and hear that they use some of my photos for their inspiration boards,” he says. But as his reputation and work expands, the urgent question becomes: Who, or what, is the inspiration—Schuman’s eye or the street?

After all, designers drawing inspiration from the street is nothing new. For decades trends have been trickling up, rather than down, the fashion ladder by companies who have long recognized their dwindling power and influence as dictators of the Next Look. Yet never has the focus on street style been so candid and explicit until the emergence of blogs like The Sartorialist, where private and discreet people-watching gives way to a vicarious form of communal ogling. It is therefore important to consider the man behind the camera as well as the subjects in front of it, because it is not only the shapes, but the shapes’ context that inspires.