Neo-Victorian, Pre-Raphaelite: Tracing Victorian Art in Contemporary Fashion Photography
The Pre-Raphaelite Movement was born as a rebellion from traditional Victorian artistic practices; yet the surge of interest in anything-and-everything Victorian, or to put it academically, Neo-Victorianism, also includes this rebellious member of the Victorian family. Motifs or imagery taken from the Pre-Raphaelite art style are dispersed throughout a variety of mediums in contemporary visual culture, such as “high” art, fashion photography, movies, TV shows, comic books and even stage personalities of musicians. The impact of Pre-Raphaelitism on contemporary visual culture is especially important because it often has a specific gendered narrative which results in feeding into the current stereotypes of womanhood and femininity. The mediums I mentioned above use different components of the Pre-Raphaelite style, yet the visual archetype of the Pre-Raphaelite Woman with her prototypical red hair and melancholy disposition is often at the very centre of these reimaginings. This visual archetype has its own culture connotations, such as being an erotic, objectified construction that was shaped by the male gaze. However false, connotations such as these prove to have carrried on from Victorian culture to our contemporary one. Therefore, this paper aims to determine the specific ways that contemporary visual culture draws on Pre-Raphaelitism to create and contest a this gendered stereotype of women. I will limit my focus to the medium of fashion photography since it fully reveals the scope of the Pre-Raphaelite influence on contemporary visual culture. While it is easily accessible by the everyday consumer, especially with the rise of social media, its primary audience is a very elite group, which consists of high-brow individuals in the fashion industry. Therefore fashion photography oversteps the boundaries of its audience and has a wider influence on visual culture. All the artists I chose to focus on for this paper center Pre-Raphaelite Woman in their art, hence contributing to the contemporary reimaginings of this visual archetype, as well as shaping of the stereotype of femininity brings with. A preliminary list of the photographers whose work I will discuss in this paper is as follows: Donna Stevens (Australia), Tom Hunter (Britain), Annie Leibovitz (US), Malgorzata Maj (Poland), Miles Adridge (Britain), Billy&Hells (Germany) and Ekaterina Belinskaya (Russia).
Derya Sayın studied Art History in Mimar Sinan Fine Arts University (Istanbul, Turkey) for her Bachelor’s degree between 2013-2018; and spent a semester in University of Ljubljana (Ljubljana, Slovenia) in 2015 as a part of the Erasmus+ exchange programme. She completed her Master’s education between 2018-2020 in European Women’s and Gender History (MATILDA), which took place between two universities: Central European University (Budapest, Hungary), and University of Vienna (Vienna, Austria). The title of her extended master’s thesis (35,000 words) is “Not Your Object of Desire: Reclaiming Women’s Role in Constructing the Pre-Raphaelite Woman.”
