Visual Culture Blog

This American Apparel ad, alongside several other similarly suggestive ads from their website, has recently been banned by the Advertising Standards Authority ASA in the United Kingdom. In this blog post I am not arguing whether or not this ban is justified, but rather, I want to analyse the reasons for the ban itself. In a statement, the ASA explained their decision as following:

“We considered that in the particular context of images which featured nudity and sexually provocative poses, there was a voyeuristic and ‘amateurish’ quality to the images which served to heighten the impression that the ads were exploitative of women and inappropriately sexualised young women.”

Important here is the word ‘amateurish’ – purposefully put into quotation marks to underline the potential vagueness of the term. So what exactly makes the images in the American Apparel campaign ‘amateurish’? Rejecting the ASA complaint, an American Apparel spokesperson supplied a useful starting point for this question by arguing that the subjects in the photographs are ‘real, non-airbrushed, everyday people’. American Apparel’s casual response to the ASA complaint neatly disguises the fact that the subjects in the photographs are not merely ‘people’, but they are women, young women, carefully selected (and thus not ‘everyday’ by definition) to suit a brand identity. Despite this inherent contradiction, American Apparel’s statement that the women in the photographs are real and non-airbrushed directly corresponds with ASA’s assessment that the images are ‘amateurish’. In other words, the perceived realness of the female subjects is one of the determining factors in creating images that are deemed ‘amateurish’.

American Apparel quite openly plays with this notion of the amateur since the subject in the photographs is an amateur model as opposed to a professional model. The ads themselves seek to support this narrative by including text such as ‘Meet Steffi’. Notably, unlike the Campbells, Schiffers, or Evangelistas of the past, ‘Steffi’ has no last name, further signifying her status as amateur plucked from a crowd of ‘everyday people’. The bland and seemingly ill-considered location, the unmade bed (perhaps in a hotel room), even the cables from a bedside lamp all contribute to the perception that the images are amateurish. Lastly, the way the photographs were taken – namely with a direct flash light perhaps mounted on a point and shoot camera and seemingly accidental framing – further signify the amateurishness in the image. ASA’s assessment that the images appear exploitative and voyeuristic is provoked by the patriarchal vantage point of the photograph – the male photographer pointing down the camera and thus dominating over the female subject. Here, the downward gaze functions as a metaphor for sexual domination. Looking at all these variables in the photograph, I would argue that rather than the subject signifying the ‘amateurish’, it is the way that the photographs were taken that contribute to this perception the most. In other words, it is not primarily the subjects in the American Apparel ads that are amateurish, but the photographs.

Establishing this important distinction between amateurish subjects and amateurish photographs helps to understand why specifically these American Apparel ads were banned by the ASA. Take for example the recent shoe campaign by the British pop singer Cheryl Cole. Similar to the American Apparel ads, the position of Cole’s exposed legs, the hands in between her legs, and her gaze back to the camera are all sexually suggestive. Yet the fact that Cole’s campaign was not banned (and I am sure that there are many similar campaigns that also have not been banned) relates less to the gesture, position or the state of undress of the subject, than it relates to the setting, format and technique of the photograph. Unlike the American Apparel ads, the shoe campaign was photographed in a studio, under controlled lighting with professional grade equipment. For the lack of a better term, it’s a professional photograph.

As a consequence of this logic, it must be deduced that professional looking photographs – no matter how exploitative, voyeuristic or sexually suggestive they may be – are less likely banned. The assumed professionalism and perfection of commercial photography thus appears to legitimise the sexualisation of women (as well as men). The more perfect (and therefore less real) the photograph, the more sexual the context of the photograph can be.

Yet there is, I believe, another reason why Cheryl Cole’s ad is unlikely going to raise eyebrows with the ASA and the majority of the public. As the shoes make up a central part of the image, the photograph clearly reads as an ad for shoes (if not fashion as a whole). So in addition to professional-looking and therefore non-amateur photography, images with a clearly decipherable commercial agenda appear to be more legitimate. This clarity about the commercial intent of the brand is completely absent in the American Apparel ad: although the viewer knows it’s an ad for clothing, the photograph could easily be a snapshot in a private photo album or a men’s magazine. The ambiguity of what exactly the photograph seeks to promote thus filters into a number of other ambiguities apparent in the photographs: the ambiguous age of the young woman, the ambiguous reference to a sexual act as signified by the unmade bed and the ambiguous presence of a potentially exploitative and voyeuristic Other (e.g. the photographer himself). Paraphrasing the unlikely source Donald Rumsfeld, it’s these known unknowns that most likely triggered the banning of these ads.

For more on the representation of gender in the media, please read my posts The Perfume Ad Formula and The Aesthetics of Artificiality.

Sandra Kantanen, Untitled (Lake), 2011

The Finnish artist Sandra Kantanen currently has her first UK solo exhibition at the Purdy Hicks Gallery. It is somewhat ironic that the exhibition has the matter-of-fact title ‘Photographs 2009 – 2011′, while the works on display are so much more than just photographs. In fact, Kantanen evidently experiments with the medium of photography to create visually complex and multi-layered digital montages.

‘Plum Blossoms’, ink and color on paper by Lu Zhi (Lu Chih), China, Ming dynasty, mid 16th century

Informed by her experience of studying at the Central Academy of Fine Art in Beijing in 2001, Kantanen’s montages apparently reference traditional Chinese landscape paintings. The visual reference to Chinese art is attempted by representing landscapes with minimal aesthetics, by using toned down and pastel colours, even the vertical format of Kantanen’s works mirror landscape scrolls which are, much like Chinese writing, read from top to bottom. Kantanen’s images represent a lush flora and fauna: green tree branches reaching into the image, fish faintly visible in a lake, clouds in the sky reflected on the surface of the water. The multitude of reflections and distortions creates a topsy-turvy world in which the difference between earth, water and sky becomes increasingly blurred.

Sandra Kantanen, Untitled (Sakura 3), 2011

It would, however, be disingenuous to overstress this relation to Chinese art as Katanen’s works are quite obviously a hybrid product informed by a multitude of diverse cultural sources. For instance, while in Chinese art depictions of the plum tree blossom are more common, in ‘Untitled (Sakura 3)’ Kantanen refers to the cherry blossom – a signifier of seasonality (and patriotism) specific to traditional Japanese art. The unusual method of foreshortening the landscape by titling the camera downwards rather than into the distance also creates a visual contrast to the deep perspectives which tend to parallel intricate narratives in East Asian art. As such, Kantanen’s works probably have more in common aesthetically with the paintings of the French Impressionist Claude Monet. Particularly those works that include water are strongly reminiscent of Monet’s celebrated series ‘Water Lilies’. Some of Kantanen’s works even include, what appear to be, patches of colours applied by a brush (digital or analogue) thus reinforcing a link to Western traditions of art that use thick paints rather than inks.

Claude Monet, Water Lilies

In this cultural mix, Kantanen’s own background, having graduated from the celebrated Helsinki School of Photography, must also be considered. Unlike artists from the so-called Düsseldorf School of Photography, renowned for producing formal, objective, and technically precise photographs, the Helsinki School is far less easily defined in terms of a common style. Perhaps conscious of being defined by her education, Kantanen produces works that seek to break a mold, that evade easy definitions, that question the integrity of the image. At the same time however, perhaps as a result of evading definitions and categorizations, the works on display appear to be conceptually suspended: they are neither a critique of Asian art, nor Western art, nor, in fact, photography. Rather, Kantanen presents the viewer with a dreamlike and eternally foggy world, a world in which nature blossoms during all seasons, a beautiful yet also alienating world which can only exist as a montage.

Sandra Kantanen: Landscapes is available as a book. Other recommendations can be found in our online bookshop.