kate moss nude - a "turning point for fashion and art" ??

Nothing has really changed  . The teen aged body is  still  sold as the body to be. And photography continues to play its usual part in objectifying, idealising and  idolising the young body that never grows older or bigger. Photographers continue to play out their part in what is basically a business as usual exploitation of vulnerable young people . No questions are asked as they are when the non advertising  industry  photographers shoot not for the advertising world but  for  Art.  I remember the ruckus Bill Henson's photographs caused and the attacks on even photographers like Sally Mann. 

The promotion of  consumer culture, it seems, is just too important  to allow the same questions of  pedophilia and exploitation  into the world of commercial advertising .

And this frank blast from an iconic past  comes from the mouth of one of the most famous of those   faces.  Kate Moss 

   

“I had a nervous breakdown when I was 17 or 18, when I had to go and work with Marky Mark and Herb Ritts,” she says. “It didn’t feel like me at all. I felt really bad about straddling this buff guy. I didn’t like it. I couldn’t get out of bed for two weeks. I thought I was going to die. I went to the doctor, and he said, ‘I’ll give you some Valium,’ and Francesca Sorrenti, thank God, said, ‘You’re not taking that.’ It was just anxiety. Nobody takes care of you mentally. There’s a massive pressure to do what you have to do. I was really little, and I was going to work with Steven Meisel. It was just really weird—a stretch limo coming to pick you up from work. I didn’t like it. But it was work, and I had to do it.”



Moss also talks about how uncomfortable she was posing nude when she was young. Remembering her now classic photo shoot with Corinne Day for The Face, Moss says, “I see a 16-year-old now, and to ask her to take her clothes off would feel really weird. But they were like, If you don’t do it, then we’re not going to book you again. So I’d lock myself in the toilet and cry and then come out and do it. I never felt very comfortable about it. There’s a lot of boobs. I hated my boobs! Because I was flat-chested. And I had a big mole on one. That picture of me running down the beach—I’ll never forget doing that, because I made the hairdresser, who was the only man on the shoot, turn his back.”


http://www.vanityfair.com/online/daily/2012/10/kate-moss-years-of-crying-johnny-depp

For many models, taking your clothes off is part of the job. When I worked for the Face (much later – I started in 1999), our fashion directorKatie Grand was at pains to emphasise that a fashion shoot was a collaboration between model, photographer, stylist and all the other people who worked on it, and that the models – particularly if they had to take their clothes off, a frequent occurrence in her pictures – should feel an active, looked-after part of the creative process rather than its passive subject. Hopefully that is the way fashion shoots work now. The fact that Moss has posed for umpteen nudes since, with many different photographers, suggests that it was the coercion rather than the nudity that upset her.

Ultimately, the shoot was a bad experience for Moss, but a turning point for fashion and art. Back in 1990, she took one for the team.