Framing modern anxiety in Selling Dreams photographic exhibition

PHOTOGRAPHERS Richard Avedon and Edward Steichen are part of Selling Dreams, which comes to the State Library of NSW from London.

Lily Cole & Giant Camera (Italian Vogue, 2005) by Tim Walker. From the exhibition Selling Dreams, State Library of NSW, Sydney, until November 10. Courtesy Tim Walker/ Victoria and Albert Museum, London

IT is a sign of the times that one of the big banks is running an advertising campaign on bus shelters across Sydney in which various ostensibly unlikely people are declaring they use the company's broking and investment services.

There is evidently still enough novelty in the idea of a worker in overalls or an elderly woman managing a portfolio of assets for this to be an attention-getting angle. But what is really striking is the attitudes these advertisements assume about money and material wealth.

Decades ago, materialism was more discreet and even the affluent might think it vulgar to speak openly about their wealth. On the Left, there was a sense that inequality in this respect was effectively injustice, while even on the Right there was a certain cultural egalitarianism and reluctance to translate money into overt class distinctions; ultimately, indeed, both sides shared the assumption that for some to be rich, others had to be poor.

In the brave new world we now live in, all can be rich; everyone, therefore, can feel entitled to boast about their investment properties and share portfolios. If our wealth entails the poverty of anyone else, they are out of sight in foreign countries. This is the world in which the word aspiration, which once meant a longing for higher things, has been debased into its antithesis, the craving for more material possessions and higher social status.

Vulgarity has come in from the cold, which is why the world of contemporary art, for a time the domain of contestation and oppositional thinking, has become the fashion accessory of the corporate world. It is the commercialisation of contemporary art that explains its new ubiquity in the big state galleries. And the same logic has led to an explosion of exhibitions devoted to fashion - once unthinkable - in the public galleries, because fashion will attract audiences who would not come for art.

Fashion photography is more justifiable than frocks and hats because the best of it has its own aesthetic interest, even if such images inevitably are compromised by their function in the manufacture of illusion. But the reason galleries show it is the same: it is the glamour that will draw in the crowds, not a curiosity to ponder complex ideological imagery.

A couple of the most important exponents of the genre are presently or soon showing at important public galleries: the National Portrait Gallery in Canberra has Richard Avedon, while Edward Steichen will be at the National Gallery of Victoria in Melbourne from October 18. Both these photographers, meanwhile, are part of Selling Dreams, which comes to the State Library of NSW from the Victoria and Albert Museum in London.

The first thing in the exhibition is a striking image by Irving Penn (1950) of a woman wearing a harlequin dress; the whole composition is dominated, indeed, by the sharp but irrational geometry of black and white patches that completely covers and conceals the body of the model; her neck is bound tight in several rings of a pearl necklace and her hard, angular features turn an impervious, impenetrable surface towards the viewer, dark-painted mouth closed.

This photograph says much about the whole genre of fashion photography, in its simultaneous evocation and shielding of sexuality behind the extravagant covering of the body; in the face, which cannot be literally covered, the painted lips are an almost aggressive suggestion of the vulva, which is simultaneously contained by the inorganic, impossible precision of their outlining, while the features, flawlessly made up, are set into a deliberately incommunicative mask.

If this is the dream that is being sold, what does it consist in exactly? It is not an image of warmth, amiability or spontaneous sexuality; rather of a kind of hysterical, self-conscious frigidity. Still less is it an image of beauty, for beauty implies a deep kind of inward presence and harmony, a self-sufficiency that does not need to display itself to the viewer to exist. Real beauty is a plenitude of being that attracts us all the more the less it displays itself.

This is the opposite, a febrile superficiality, the desperate staging of a defensive screen against the world. And while the spectacle of beauty is so complete that it does not raise the question of how far we fall short, this kind of picture is an assault on its viewers, a challenge to reflect on themselves and consider anxiously whether they too have achieved the same combination of desirability and perfect control over the image they project.

We may well wonder why such pictures exist, since they embody neither beauty nor aesthetic insight, although, like other images produced for the purposes of manipulation, exploitation or ideology, they may be of interest as objects of deconstruction.

Ultimately, the image projected here is akin to the theatrical self-presentation of dandyism, a phenomenon that has analogies in many times and places but strictly belongs to a period from the very end of the 18th to the beginning of the 20th centuries. It was most importantly discussed by Charles Baudelaire, but also attracted the attention of others such as Jules Barbey d'Aurevilly and Joris-Karl Huysmans, author of the remarkable novel A Rebours, usually translated as Against Nature (1884).

The dandy is not simply a young man who takes an inordinate pleasure in his dress but, in the deepest sense, is one who is obsessed by a need to control the image he projects. As such he belongs to the world of the modern city. In smaller, traditional communities, most people are to a greater or lesser degree known to each other. And when we know people, our view of them is not fundamentally changed by seeing them impeccably or carelessly presented.

The world of the modern city is very different. Baudelaire's fourmillante cite - a city crawling with people like ants - is a world of strangers. It is a place of first impressions and of constant and potentially hostile judgment, since human beings tend to be friendly and relaxed in small groups, but anxious and easily irascible in larger ones. The dandy responds to the unbearable strain of being constantly the object of the eyes of strangers by constructing an impervious mask of elegance; he compensates for his lack of real self-possession and inner equilibrium by secreting a hard shell, like an insect.

Photography made matters worse, especially with the invention of smaller and faster cameras and the explosion of consumer photography. One the one hand homemade snaps revealed the objective imperfections of the features even of the beautiful; on the other hand, studio photography, with a combination of costume, make-up and lighting, could produce images of a dreamlike perfection, even if they were really the freezing of an instant under completely artificial conditions.

We may know the appearance of perfect poise and flawless composure in these pictures would not survive a few minutes' conversation, let alone eating, walking or dancing. The gap between the extremes of homemade photography and studio illusion produces an irresistible tension, like the gap between two poles with positive and negative electric charges. And that tension, that unhappiness and dissatisfaction, is the energy source of advertising.

The exhibition includes many images of the illusions produced by the genre, and a few glances behind the scenes, as in a striking shot of two models surrounded by designers, fashion writers and paparazzi. What is extraordinary, almost shocking in this picture is the contrast between the glamour of the models and the mass of ugliness, meanness and grasping appetite behind them; nothing could more clearly reveal the falseness of the manipulation involved in the fabrication of glamour.

But even if the models are statuesque compared with the short, fat and wizened figures behind them, the haughty set of their expression is no less unattractive. And this is so despite what might carelessly be considered the handsomeness of their physical features because haughtiness, hostility and pride are never beautiful, nor do they convey the unselfconscious presence of real beauty.

In fact, the expressions on the faces of models in the past century of the genre's existence have changed significantly. In the earliest examples here, the expressions are more natural and self-confident. Perhaps this is because such fashion images were addressed to a prosperous class relatively sure of its position. Later, especially in the postwar years, expressions become more haughty and remote, perhaps as a manifestation of the great broadening of the consumer market for fashion and the greater instability of class identity.

Towards the end of the century things change again. Maybe the haughtiness no longer seems plausible, especially as advertising departs from older images of upper-middle-class life and seeks to exploit alternative scenarios. In any case, the new expression for models begins to be the sullen, surly blankness we have been accustomed to for many years now, while they also get younger and thinner, even further from the reality of the women to whom the messages are directed.

A few works rise above the level of commercial exploitation, sometimes simply because of the inventiveness or wit with which the images are conceived, as in a picture of a young man and woman in sexually ambiguous attitudes and dress, posed before a kind of theatrical set of a staircase whose two flights don't quite join.

Among the most memorable is a shot of a woman from the back by Horst P. Horst. Elbows raised and back arched, she seems to stretch like a cat while her lower ribs and waist are constrained by a corset. This image of tension between freedom and constraint was an advertisement for a corset, but was also the last image he shot before leaving Europe for America at the outset of World War II.

Most engaging, and surprisingly humane, is a shot by John French of a pretty woman on a jetty in the lake at Hyde Park in London (1955). She is a picture of perfect elegance, and while the reality of her body is hidden in the silhouette of an abundant coat, she does not have the usual hard and closed features but a happy smile as she glances off to one side: she seems almost to be showing off for the benefit of a young man in a bowler hat, seated reading the paper behind her. The scene is played out with good humour, its artifice acknowledged by the hand of the photographer in the foreground, about to press the shutter release, cleverly suggesting that we are witnessing the moment before the production of the illusion, not the illusion itself.

Selling Dreams, State Library of NSW, Sydney, until November 10.