The Brooklyn Rail

Like any genre or style of art-making, fashion photography is structured by convention. We could postulate that in the first instance, the fashion photograph, and the fashion photoshoot more generally, has as its goal the elevation of a commercial product out of the realm of use or exchange-value and into a space of aesthetic contemplation as an end in itself. With such a directive in mind, a photographer, like William Klein or Irving Penn, can emphasize the graphic and textural qualities of a dress within a picture that is complex on the whole. A different photographer, like Steven Klein or Juergen Teller, might construct scenes of surreality or horror as in the former, or those that seem effortfully casual and nondescript in the latter, within which a pair of stilettos or a handbag might function as no more than wardrobe or set design. What is remarkable, and beguiling, about Paul Kooiker’s fashion photographs, which have been edited and sequenced together for the very first time in Fashion, is that rather than transpose his photographic style and sensibility into the genre of fashion photography, he has inverted the relationship altogether: brand, commodity, celebrity, and, perhaps most importantly, the human body are used as pretexts to explore their collective exaggeration.

Fashion highlights a fairly recent addition to Kooiker’s photography. He began accepting editorial work of this kind around 2016, meaning he came to the industry later than many photographers typically do, and so was able to bring with him a fully-matured aesthetic and set of interests. The book is composed of ten chapters with twenty-four images in each, and what is obvious after only the first one is that Kooiker’s pictures are unified by his style and not by the fact of having been commissioned; were it not for the captions that conclude each chapter, or for the sporadic visibility of branding throughout the book, one might think all of these pictures were made together as part of a single, interminable photoshoot. Such is the level of stylistic, and chromatic, consistency that Kooiker retains from image to image, all of which were taken with an iPhone (a fact worth noting if only because very little, if anything, about these pictures suggests either the flexibility or mobility that such a format provides).

Most of the pictures are black and white and given the sepia toning that Kooiker employs so often in his work, but the few which break from this mold do so with color that somehow reads as vibrant and muted at the same time. By way of contrast to the sepia-toned images, those in color manage to remind us of a fashion industry so often defined by gloss, sheen, and glamor. That we might forget about the industry and those specific qualities, if only briefly, is a possibility produced by Kooiker’s consistent emphasis on isolated body parts, unsettling textures, and pictures that focus on props and other discrete objects—a hair dryer, a ladder, and even segments of cheese—as more the subject than whatever piece of jewelry or clothing may surround them, which we can see in Untitled (AnOther Magazine) (2021), where a translucent mannequin leg bent more than ninety degrees at the knee is fitted with a stiletto pump. Though our attention is meant for the shoe, the image’s placement at the midway point of the sequence causes us to look longer, and with greater curiosity, at the shimmering surface of the mannequin and the shape of its angle.

As in previous books, such as Eggs and Rarities (2018), the use of sepia toning allows Kooiker to subsume markers of historical time and specificity that a given image may otherwise have within his overarching vision. This effect is all the more potent when ostensibly the subject is fashion and our expectation is that some degree of contemporaneity will be visible. In Untitled (Magazine) (2018), two models wearing feather-plumed heels and thin flowing gowns from neck to toe are shown with faces turned upward, looking out from within the plastic casing that surrounds them; their elegance, Kooiker’s framing of them, and the way sepia effectively removes them from a time close to ours, creates a scene which seems to exist outside of time altogether, leaving us with the lingering thought that they may be apparitions.

Though timelessness is a consistent quality in Kooiker’s work, in these photographs he is just as interested in pursuing what is odd, unseemly, and even grotesque within the context of a fashion photoshoot, allowing us to understand that such qualities are always present should one know where and how to look. We can see this demonstrated in Untitled (Hercules) (2020), a picture which omits all except for a broad, hair-covered torso with patches that glisten and shine with styled hair in the shape of curvilinear patterns. Likewise, in Untitled (Luncheon) (2021), a model’s stiletto clad foot is shown covered in a thick, dough-like substance that obscures large areas of the shoe, making the picture about the obstruction of visibility just as it substitutes an unknown, texturally evocative (and alluring) material for the surface of high-end fashion. There are also many pictures which hew more closely to the conventional expectations of fashion photography, despite some of Kooiker’s framings and compositions. In Untitled (Acne Studios) (2022), the recurring visual tropes that we can recognize, such as the isolation of a brand name or the crisp and central staging of a specific garment or accessory, keep us connected to the unifying, titular theme of the book.

One of the more important, cumulative effects of the book’s sequence is that Kooiker’s pictures are released from their original editorial contexts, allowing us to both appreciate the unique points of emphasis in his work (the obscure and the vulgar, the surreal and the unexpected), and to expand our own concept of fashion almost to the point of breaking apart entirely. Indeed, what the pictures in aggregate make clear is that Kooiker came to each of these jobs ready to focus on the explicit subjects, making them into conduits for desire (which is to say, how he expected to get paid in full and hired again), but also ready to focus on the margins of each scene, on fragments of wardrobe and set design, and on an angle or pose that results in an outtake (of which many of these are) that might be more open to ambiguity and suggestion. It is these latter qualities that define the book in the end, for no sooner than after the last page has been turned will we double back again to the beginning, desperate to better understand how Kooiker has managed to transform fashion, as both concept and genre, into an extension of his art.