Annelie Vandendael’s photographs are strange pictures that subvert fashion photography, take away the beauty of the face and force us to look at the figure, the pose, the action.
Vandendael is a fashion photographer but her profession has led her to see how the models identity has been lost within our idealized version of beauty. This realisation became the starting point for these wonderful pictures in which Vandendael placed her models in incongrous positions so as to hide their face. This juxtaposition of headless figures photographed within the parameters of a fashion aesthetic – that seeks to capture beauty – asks questions of the image itself. What is its purpose? Who are these people? What are they doing?
The answer is we don’t know. It is beyond our remit. What we see is what we get, beautiful photographs of people in a natural environment wearing vintage clothes and striking strange poses. This is what fashion photography is. Yet it is not. Vanendael has made her models faceless to bring to our attention the loss of identity within the fashion industry and the quixiotic search for idealized beauty. It is futile. Here’s what she has to say about her work:
In my view there is often much identity lost in fashion photography. Much is Photoshopped and models are completely transformed, as a result you get images that are far from reality. People are faced with an ideal that does not actually exist. That is where models lose their identity for me. Thus, the idea grew to be heads off or cover the identity elsewhere. For me that is not in the face of the model, but rather in what is happening in the picture, how they move and what they do. It’s another way of looking at images.