Baroque Bodies, Modern Magazines: the Eternal Pose

A critique of contemporary fashion magazine photoshoot culture as apparatus

Disclaimer: This was originally written as a piece for publication in a zine produced by my dear friend Katy Kurzweil that is to be released at the end of 2025. The purpose of her zine is to investigate the tendency of consumer culture to revive and commodify visual aesthetics that were once borne from legitimate cultural and political movements. My piece is intended as a cultural critique of dominant structures within the “fashion” image-making apparatus, drawing from relevant theory to interrogate how meaning, subjectivity, and responsibility are shaped through visual culture. It is not meant to dismiss or diminish the work of those rare individuals in any fashion scene who are actively challenging these structures and producing work that is intentional, critical, and ground-breaking. Their efforts are vital and exist, in many ways, in spite of the apparatus rather than because of it.

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In his piece “Rokeby Venus," the Spanish Baroque (and briefly tenebrist) artist Diego Velázquez provides a portrayal of the titular Roman goddess of desire and fertility that, at first glance, does not seem atypical. She is painted with as much porcelain luminescence as ever, her sensual and nude body somehow both languorous and remarkably curved atop rich silk sheets that echo her erotic shape as Cupid, unusually liberated from bow and arrow, holds a mirror up to her face.

However, a few features of note cast this work towards the outskirts of the canon of both female nudes and depictions of Venus. For one, the painting is obfuscated with a deliberately sketchy style that blurs most everything outside of the foreground as viewers are positioned to observe the subject from behind, with her face completely out of profile. Additionally, and perhaps most of note, is that Velázquez combines two traditional portrayals of Venus - one being that of her sitting up and gazing at her reflection in the mirror, the other being her reclined curvaceously in some sort of landscape.

The result is a sort of Frankensteinian representation of Venus gazing vainly at her reflection, as she was oft to do in the renderings from which Velázquez referred. And yet, upon deeper inspection, her reflection is actually oriented only towards the viewer. She cannot see herself - her feminine elegance is framed entirely for consumption by the audience. Of course this is voyeuristic, but it also operates on a second level. Though the setting and context of the work are classical, they function as an excuse for the representation of a material aesthetic sexuality, one which situates the consumption of beauty as it pertains to attraction and desire as superior to her actual sexuality. As we are confronted with her gaze in the mirror, there is a chilling and unavoidable mutual acknowledgement of her status as the surveyed subject and ours as the spectator.

Perhaps her indulgence in this voyeurism is intentional and she is in control as she commands our eye with her passive glower. Perhaps her compression into this focal point is suffocating, even disparaging. I am more interested in the object of the mirror here as an early sort of apparatus that frames her feminine form as pure image, and how the apparatus of fashion photoshoot culture today could serve as a contemporary manifestation of this systemetized image consumption through its similar mutual exploitation of both subject and object simultaneously.

In Jean-Louis Baudry’s development of apparatus theory, he essentially situates the technical instruments behind the making and viewing of a film as small pieces of machinery. These nuts and bolts (the camera, the editing bay, the projector, a darkened room, etc) are inextricably a part of their larger system, that is, the film as an ideological machine for consumption by a viewer. The goal of these small parts is to create an illusion of wholeness so that the artificiality of the apparatus is masked in favor of a seemingly seamless reality for immersion by audiences. When this simulated reality is effectively presented to viewers, they are then themselves made into subjects by their unconscious identification with the images being presented and, subsequently, their inevitable absorption into the ideological roles of the film. This is effective by way of the apparatus’ ability to hide its own constructedness and present its underlying ideology as a simple truth within the reality it has simulated.

Though Baudry’s concept revolves largely around cinematic apparatuses, it is not difficult to see how it may apply to other forms of media, namely, that of fashion magazines and the photoshoot culture that orbits them. These also have their own complex apparatus, with parts that are heavily constructed to sell products and/or social roles through the distribution of images that are simultaneously desirable and appearing as natural and effortless. They produce a ready-made and highly specific way of seeing, desiring, and being by imitating the structure of human vision and desire. Consumers of these images are positioned to not only misrecognize themselves as within the screen’s image, but also, misrecognize the images themselves as a reflection of reality when they are, in actuality, embedded with ideological fantasies. The spectator takes the false image to be a recognition of themselves and their reality, but the fact that this presentation is already-always a fantasy makes it so that this can only ever be a misrecognition.

In making the viewer a subject of ideology in this way, it is not possible to argue that the magazine photoshoot culture apparatus’ act of image-making is a neutral one. By its very nature, the apparatus positions the observer in a specific way, one that influences their perception of and identification with the images being presented to them. The apparatus consists of both technological and institutional features. Consider, to ground ourselves momentarily, the forces that shape the marketability of an image or the margins of the profitable mold, the hyperlink-riddled landscape of the advertorial, or the complex cultural distribution channels that these images are funneled through in post-production. This is an elaborate cultural network that reigns over the production, visibility, and desirability of images; this productive power carries with it a certain responsibility, or at the very least, intentionality.

And yet many of the cultural networks that shape this apparatus view that responsibility as an obligatory burden, ripe to be shirked in favor of the illusion of cultural relevance, avoidance of political accountability, or even just a comped piece of prêt-à-porter Prada. Ownership over the apparatus means ownership over cultural meaning-making; and within that structure, there is an active incentive to conceal that ownership entirely. The power of the image-maker is greatest when its mechanics are invisible, when ideology appears as aesthetic instinct or trend. By masking the ideological conditions of production, the apparatus protects its gatekeepers from scrutiny, letting them pose as neutral curators or tastemakers rather than ideological agents. In that case, why not disown the political or ideological consequences of your work in order to protect your position as the gatekeeper of image?

As such, these apparatuses tend to construct an enclosed, ideological world, severed from social reality to the point of regurgitation. This self-referencing folds back in on itself until the images that result from it produce their own subjects, and these subjects are the vessels through which viewers are positioned into the world of the image. For all of its flaws, Tiqqun’s Preliminary Materials for a Theory of the Young-Girl produces a helpful explanation for the status of these subjects by giving them a specific name and shape: the Young-Girl. The term is used here not as an actual signifier of youth or gender, but as a social model for subjectivity that represents the ideal consumer-subject. She is a “template,” desirable and modifiable, simultaneously produced by and reflected within the images of the magazine photoshoot culture apparatus and the consumer society that it generates.

Tiqqun says the Young-Girl is “pure sign-value.” She exists to be seen, to circulate, to provoke desire or envy, but she no longer refers to any social reality (think labor, struggle, materiality, age). Ultimately, the beauty, femininity, and cultural capital reflected in the constructed reality of these images are mere signs that have been emptied of social or material truth, then refilled with market value. The most harrowing part of how these apparatuses eliminate the material world from their images is how bodies and subjects become evermore polarized from their social realities as we consume them.

This emptying of the self and continuous re-injection of it with market value that occurs as we progress deeper into a consumer society, Tiqqun believes, causes capital to continually anthropomorphize. That is, as capital becomes more entwined with the social, its physiognomy no longer looks like the typical exchanges of credit (diplomas, mortgage payments, labor contracts) and adopts a more dilatory character. Something less rewarding. Our integration into these capital exchanges, now, revolve around the act of self-valorization, the pursuit of the Young-Girl. It is a pursuit with no objective base to measure against, and which ultimately results in our relation to ourselves as revolving around a value - a value mediated by the series of controlled abstractions fed to us by the apparatuses responsible for this socialization of capital. As such, we lose intimacy with ourselves, with those around us, with our day-to-day interactions with the world. It is hard to pretend we are sovereign subjects in this case, as we become blended with the conventions and codes of this developing social order.

Tangentially to this, Tiqqun writes, “The consumer can never stop consuming and start producing, she can only re-produce herself.” I believe this is the result of an existence in this swirling world of image: the continual drive for the subject to remake oneself in a desperate gesture towards individuality, and for the apparatuses themselves to collapse into a conglomeration of referential images. As bodies, subjects, and ideas are turned into statically ahistorical signs rather than real social positions with real contexts, social realities become trapped in time (or pinterest boards), no more than photoshoot fodder.

Here I cannot resist turning to Mark Fisher, particularly ideas from Ghosts of My Life: Writings on Depression, Hauntology and Lost Futures, where he largely laments the recycling of past aesthetics and the death of the "future" as a cultural concept. Fischer’s overall feeling is that we are trapped in the repetition of dead forms, bogged down in “a culture of retrospection” where simulated nostalgia takes precedence over the creation of anything new. This is an inarguable reality of our contemporary photoshoot culture apparatus, where every image seems to simply refer to previous images - where it’s a conglomeration of pinterest board references or recycled, older, and more iconic cultural references.

Take, for example, the latest Heaven by Marc Jacobs campaign, which depicts models Iris Law and Gabriette Bechtel as the adolescent subjects of Catherine Hardwicke’s 2003 film Thirteen. An attempted ode to the sleazy and realist portrayal of middle school’s disturbing underbelly (and by that I mean grooming and drugging-disturbing as opposed to bullying and popularity-disturbing), the shoot is an advertisement for the brand’s newest line. The photoshoot portrays the friendship dynamic of the film’s female protagonists, there is an exact recreation of the film’s poster, and some of the stylistic elements of the film such as its high-contrast and saturated coloring are applied to the shoot, but beyond that, there is no other actual relevance between the two media artifacts. The social and emotional weight of the film is completely hollowed out, recycled, and aestheticized. Retro-cool visuals and suggestive allusions are used to build a nostalgic vibe rather than engage with the actual stakes of the film. The shoot uses the idea of edge or transgression, but only for mood and marketability. This shows the late-stage apparatus at work: digesting past images, detaching them from material or emotional context, and re-presenting them as fashion.

Fisher believes that this regurgitation of image is a result of a kind of neoliberal capitalism where future possibility is difficult to imagine and, as such, is replaced with surface level aesthetic innovation. He writes, “What is called 'style' is always a means of translating time into space, of turning history into a frozen tableau.” The fashion photoshoot apparatus cannot imagine real alternatives, it can only dress the same consumer-subject (the Young-Girl) in new outfits. Although the images orchestrate desire within the consumer-subject, the complete severance of the images from social reality or substance means that these desires can never truly be fulfilled.

In this way, the fashion magazine photoshoot apparatus, like Velázquez’s mirror, functions as both frame and trap. It reflects an image that is not meant for the subject herself but for the perpetual observation of the consumer. It endlessly re-produces the codes of desire and consumption by severing them from any materiality and framing their allure around the act of consumption rather than the subject itself. What appears to be the production of beauty, individuality, or style is in fact the opposite: the reproduction of the same ideological structures that flatten subjectivity, suppress social reality, and divert political responsibility. The apparatus, as both a technical system and cultural network, cannot claim neutrality. It is the engine of a consumer culture that demands its subjects endlessly remake themselves in its image, all the while stripping these images of substance, future, and possibility. The ghostly reflection of Venus in Velázquez’s mirror persists in the culture of many contemporary photoshoots: a body posed for consumption, framed by an apparatus that trades in the currency of empty signs.

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