images are a major ingredient of our visual life, assimilated from magazines, hoardings and such contexts as brochures, catalogues, calendars, packaging and point-of-sale promotional material. Commercial photography thrives as a means of creating highly polished images of a stylized, glamourized and idealized view of the World in order to sell a product or a service.
The major categories of commercial photography are advertising in its countless guises, including product photography and photo-illustration, fashion, beauty and certain categories of photography which are neither reportage nor aspire to be fine art, yet which can be fascinating social documents of considerable aesthetic quality.
Irving Penn has continued to be a master in each of these genres and has set standards to which many aspire. His career has spanned forty years, during which his work, from his early fashion and still-life compositions to current still-life product studies such as his series for the cosmetics manufacturers Clinique, has shown an inimitable vision and consistent aesthetic rigour.
Ben Stern, though far from being Penn's artistic equal, became the archetypal commercial photographer in the fifties and sixties, running a vast studio in New York and showing considerable skill and versatility in interpreting the briefs of art directors and clients.
In the sixties the profession of commercial and, in particular, fashion photography became greatly glamourized: the successful young photographer became a popular folk hero, as if the camera were a passport to the illusory world which it could depict—Antonioni's film Blow-Up (1966-7) defined the role model. Among the most interesting magazines to be launched in the sixties, the photography of which captured the youthful excitement of that period, were the British Nova, which commissioned some of the best fashion photography of its day, and the German Twen, brilliantly art directed by Willy Fleckhaus.
In the sixties advertising played a secondary role to editorial photography in magazines. Today the reverse seems true, for the character of many magazines is dictated by the market needs of advertisers and many photographers bemoan the greater restrictions this imposes. The seventies and eighties have, nonetheless, brought forth a new roll-call of talent. Outstanding contemporary figures include Helmut Newton and Guy Bourdin, who have dominated the field of fashion photography; Hans Feurer, Arthur Elgort, Denis Piel and others, a few of the less celebrated but talented fashion photographers; advertising and glamour photographers such as Francis Giacobetti, James Baes…
Commercial photographers play a great role in our consumer society, creating the images of a life-style to which we are constantly encouraged to aspire. They create glamourized images of women and give a heightened visual appeal to the products which are economic mainstay of our society, be it a hamburger, a perfume or an automobile.