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Living Your Life, Georges Dambier and Fashion

Living Your Life, is an exhibition that brings together fashion photographs by Georges Dambier.

On display at the Museu Nacional do Traje, and curated by Anabela Becho, it reveals a set of images taken by the photographer during the 1950s.

These are images that show us the environment in which the photographer worked. Dambier, to photograph the models, left the studio space and went out into the street. Not infrequently, we see models in tight-fitting outfits in their photographs, almost as if they were geometric shapes themselves, or living, as articulated sculptures, in the midst of the mundane, Parisian daily life, the elusive movement of the streets.

The image of the model Ivy Nicholson, putting down a Dior piece, in the middle of Place Vendôme, is an example of this. Or Sophie Litvak, another model, photographed for ELLE magazine, in 1953, in an inclined pose, accentuating, in the composition, a descending diagonal, quite intimate. The background allows a glimpse of a bicycle that dissipates, and dissolves in the frame of the image. Cut by the “frame” of the photograph, it balances the composition, and almost evokes the term of the image deterritorialization in Deleuze, or the frames within the frames, or the closed system, and its various dimensions. Sophie Litvak appears in yet another photograph, introspective, oblivious to the hustle and bustle of the city, in the centre of Avenue Gabriel, apparently reading a newspaper, and wearing clothing by the Lanvin-Castillo brand. An element here or there, like a parked car, a fragment of a building that reveals itself, a slender iron chair. The use of diagonal, horizontal and vertical lines for the balance of the photograph is accentuated. Litvak herself appears slightly tilted.

Also, Nina, the smiling model who appears framed in Quai-Alma Marceau, alludes to the modernist and geometric forms. The photograph-centric image of Nina was published in ELLE in 1955. The model was wearing a chocolate Tweed Tailleur-Cape and a tight Balenciaga skirt.

The collection of images made in 1958 is impressive, especially in the Nazaré villa. Gunilla and Barbara Mullen, are two models who collaborate with Dambier. They land elegantly in the village, oblivious to what is happening around them. They look elsewhere, beyond the lens, and the photographer. Absorbed in the attention to any other point in the landscape, object, or form. Or even inside.

The woman is portrayed not only as the photographer’s object, not only as a delight for the eye, or because of a certain beauty, nor even because she is a model for clothing support, but also because she seems to represent a version of the woman, emancipated, endowed, appropriating the term, of a certain “dandyism” in the feminine. In an attitude or kind of cult of oneself, as the poet Baudelaire would say, when he spoke of the figure of the dandy. Dambier women are self-possessed, mysterious, and independent.

Not infrequently, in Dambier’s photographs, the clothes that the models wear denounce fluid cuts, accentuated geometrizations, and modern configurations, however, at the same time, they manifest an austere restraint.

Baudelaire’s dandy, too, in the masculine, was asked for no more than “absolute simplicity”. In the same, he moved through the streets of Paris, with elegance, lightness and haughtiness.

Curiously, despite the modernity of the figures, the elegance, the distinction, and sometimes the aristocratic pose, the models presented, in Dambier’s photographs, a certain melancholy in their eyes. Just like the protagonists described by Baudelaire. It is as if the photographer wanted to bring out the soul of the models, apart from the clothes they wore.

Damier wisely distanced himself from the role of voyeur, and was, like any street photographer, a flaneur.

But his gaze is ethically restrained, and respectful of the condition of women. In other words, it praised it, covering it with individuality and free will.

The photographer thus emanated the same spirit as the flaneur, but attributed to the protagonists of his visual stories a life, a movement, an equally contemplative attitude and of discovery.

Dambier’s models are haughty, willful and opinionated. They are jovial and dare to dream. Not infrequently they look at tenuous and distant horizons.

Cosmopolitans, the models are like “women in the crowd”, or “women of the world”, retracing the term Baudelaire used in his book “The painters of modern life”, when he spoke of men of the world. They reproduce the way of being of the photographer, who is also a man of the world.

For Sontag, there is in every photographer this sense of apprehending the world and leading it to the ultimate truth. That of being able to understand “the mysterious and legitimate way and reason of all their customs”.

The photograph in which Barbara Mullen appears, wearing a dress by the brand Triconyl, striped, with a large collar, is an example of this apprehension. Behind, in a maritime environment, the static poses of people in popular attire show this concern, almost ethnographic, of including the new in the old, the international taste in the traditional.

The photographer hides behind the photograph, anonymously, incognito, like this flaneur in Baudelaire’s book, who immerses himself so much in the “inconstant, in movement, in the fugitive and in the infinite”. An impartial effort, as Sander, the photographer mentioned by Sontag, would say: “It is not my intention to criticize or describe these people”.

Sontag herself commented that “the camera makes everyone a tourist in someone else’s reality”, and in some cases even class tourists, by bringing together the different social classes. As for example, returning to the images of Nazaré, they seem in a way to belong to this category.

Gunilla appears, in her acrobat’s lightness, suggesting movement, a movement that is announced at any moment, and that extends beyond the frame of the image. There is a geometry to the pose. The model’s feet, in a Pierrot lightness, and her legs slightly open, form a triangle in the composition of the photograph. In addition to the generous and cheerful smile that extends beyond the photographer’s lens.

In sharp contrast, and somewhat surrealistically, a little further behind Gunilla people from Nazaré emerge wearing traditional costumes.

The women appear, in the background, in armed and claustrophobic costumes.  Their clothes are not very airy, and they cover up their femininity. Their staticity and gravity contrast with the mobility of the models, who wear clothes made of light materials, some cases cotton, which was a bold and innovative fabric for the time.

Sontag, in her essay on photography, highlights the surrealizing tendency of photographic images, especially those taken as recently as the 19th century. Or street photography, which generally makes use of great contrast, and seeks the unusual, the unforeseen, the exotic, the spontaneous. What cannot be explained in words.

In addition to the various series of photographs by George Dambier, there is also an installation of a sound piece, contained in a room next to the museum. In it we hear Anabela Becho’s voice describing the contours of a piece of clothing. The author of the piece refers that it is “a piece that intends to evoke a dress, or a meta-dress, composed of several dresses, and was built with a narrative, punctuated by some sounds also evocative of the act of building a dress”.

Living Your Life, by Georges Dambier, is on view at the Museu Nacional do Traje until October 30th.

Carla Carbone was born in Lisbon, 1971. She studied Drawing in Ar.co and Design of Equipment at the Faculty of Fine Arts in Lisbon. Completed his Masters in Visual Arts Teaching. She writes about Design since 1999, first in the newspaper O Independente, then in editions like Anuário de Design, arq.a magazine, DIF, Parq. She also participates in editions such as FRAME, Diário Digital, Wrongwrong, and in the collection of Portuguese designers, edited by the newspaper Público. She collaborated with illustrations for Fanzine Flanzine and Gerador magazine. (photo: Eurico Lino Vale)

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