Product Description

Pixel Surgeons presents the very best of today's styling and illusion in fashion and lifestyle photography. Fifty years ago fashion photography was perceived as the elitist preserve of glossy magazines across the world. Today it is part of 21st-century lifestyle. Commuting to and from work, we are subjected to billboards and hoardings advertising well-known labels. It is now de rigueur for every tabloid to contain a fashion features page. Style magazines - for both men and women - dominate the heaving newsagent's shelves. Media awareness and discriminating aesthetics have provoked a multi-layered language of fashion photography, and digital technology has introduced a level of image manipulation that has further enriched the genre. Today's photographic communicators offer personal visions that grab the viewer by the throat in their attempt to satisfy the market's craving for more and more imaginative imagery. Martin Dawber presents the work of over 30 of the most exceptional new international practitioners of photography, styling, and digital manipulation, exploring their methods and influences.

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #318933 in Books
• Published on: 2005-09-15
• Original language: English
• Number of items: 1
• Binding: Paperback
• 224 pages

About the Author
Martin Dawber is a fashion expert and Department Head of Fashion and Textile Design at Liverpool John Moores University. He was the author of Wish You Were Here, Jimmy Dean, Columbus Books, 1988 and Consultant Editor for the Routledge Encyclopedia of Contemporary British Culture, 1999. He is also the author of the Mitchell Beazley title, Imagemakers: Cutting Edge Fashion Illustration.

Customer Reviews

Stunning
As a digital photographer and pixel pusher myself, it's great to see what standard everyone else is working too. There are some simply breathtaking images in here, some are outrageously distorted, and there is a point in imaging where I feel that you should stop messing with it, very few reached the point, showing plenty of passion and enthusiasm whilst producing them.

Extreme pixels
Although it is a somewhat curious selection from all over the world, it certainly shows some digital wizardry being employed by photographers in the name of fashion. Much of it features over the top Photoshop pyrotechnics, though there is a subtle difference between the images eminating from the US and Russia and those from Europeans which are altogether darker and more restrained. On the one hand Christos Magganas from Greece demonstrates total command of the most elaborate set-ups and digital manipulation of images, as does Francesco D'Isa, but the pictures of Paul F R Hamilton from the UK, using altogether more simple methods and having little or nothing to do with fashion, linger far longer in the mind. The book is worth buying for Hamilton's 8 photographs alone.

The author's comments are useful though rather annoyingly full of references to other photographers not illustrated here ... tends to come across as name dropping; but more insightful are the short statements by the photographers themselves about their ideas and work practices.