Fashion Photography and Festival Culture: What Glastonbury’s Space Does to the Imagination

• Main Author: Julie Morère
• Format: Article
• Language: English
• Published: Presses Universitaires de la Méditerranée 2014-12-01
• Series: Études Britanniques Contemporaines
• Subjects: fashion photography; space; imagination; festival culture; Britishness; globalization
• Online Access: http://journals.openedition.org/ebc/1861

Fashion photographers have often chosen the spatial configuration of art and music festivals as settings for their photo shoots. The purpose of this paper will be to show how space has been appropriated at the Glastonbury Festival of Contemporary Performing Arts from its early pastoral days to the latest mainstream craze it has become, and how it has been a source of inspiration for artists working on various media like music, sculpture, performance, body art, costuming, with a focus on fashion photography. Glastonbury is a recurrent topos in the work of three contemporary British photographers, Tim Walker, Corinne Day, and Venetia Dearden. As a constant (unity of space), it fully pertains to the artistic experience and cannot be abated to the level of a simple backcloth for a photo shoot. From Tim Walker’s 1998 youthful pictures to Corinne Day’s 2005 hippie-chic photographs and Venetia Dearden’s 2010 singling out shots of freaks and fashionistas with a portable photographic studio, the viewer gets a unique portrait of a temporary community and festival culture. Glastonbury’s seemingly hippie-like but nonetheless codified space is re-imagined in fashion photography which is itself a codified art, a confrontation that participates in the construction of the British culture and imagination.