CGD

Almost all the major names of fashion photography offered a spontaneous and natural alternative to glitz and pomp. Geoff Dyer reminds us that even Cecil Beaton wanted to “get away from snobbish elegance,” and Irving Penn felt like “a savage from the streets surrounded by sophistication,” not to mention the uncovering of glitter and misery by Corinne Day, or Jürgen Teller’s hairy butt.

Lena Knappová is a Slovakian photographer and creative director (her work directing Circ and Blue Paper magazines shows a conceptual vision which exceeds that of photography), who lives between Paris and Prague. She is one of the people bringing a taste for (controlled) passion to fashion photography, developing the triangle of r’n’r–documentary–fashion – meaning the cross-fertilization between the noble poor sprawled on their backs and the flexing alpha brands and other movers of the global economy. “We squat the mainstream / Mainstream squats us.” Although artificiality remains a part of this game of authenticity, and the idea of generating style remains, Knappová’s claim to fame rests on a certain ability to undermine this utilitarian frame. We needn’t always know whom her works serve – in fact, if they serve anyone at all. Perhaps they only feed Knappová’s own obsession – she is a cyberpunk heroine, a lone wolf slinking through the interstitial gaps, a renegade assassin harboring her own ulterior motives. A sensuous flow of seemingly stolen, pirated images touches the interspace of hazy connections, waves of melancholy and frenetic energy and joy mined from images, characters, happenings, design. Her backstage usually harkens back to the romantic legacy of the old (Christian) masters but can equally seem like a hallucinatory fly-by from a POV massacre, shot by some stalker or a fashion police SWAT team on a zig-zagging steadicam, sizzling with the symbolic capital of luxury brands and stars. Her works speak of superfluous beauty; if this is a crime, then it is a crime of passion, a passion for interspecies coupling driven by the vertigo of infinite semantic overhangs.

One of her Instagram posts is like a crossover between a smoke-screened Palais de Tokyo from a car-shared scooter with the necessary Lady D connotations (+ security/show/demo), singing “Total Eclipse of the Heart,” a smart selfie with sunglasses, a selfie with bags under the eyes (it’s a skin), a hand-drawn backstage sign reading “look up” and a grateful nod to Cate Blanchett getting out of her limo with a professionally set smile, surrounded by nervous bodyguards, eager fans and listless staff. Knappová had nothing to do with it: “Surviving another fashion week (…) painful, but great (…) Every time it’s done, my feelings are mixed but I’m happy.”

Michal Nanoru