Playing for the Camera, in Images in Time, Aesa Sigurjonsdottir & Michael A. Langkjaer, eds.

Playing, signifying, and feeling are key terms in this essay, which investigates the historical appearance of the playful body in fashion photography. It examines the difference between the representation of play – the operation of play or playfulness as a signifier – and play as a mode of affective engagement.  The period between the two World Wars was marked by the emergence of a newly mobile, playful body in fashion photography, and also by a growing awareness, within fields such as art, cultural theory, and science, of the penetration of the body by technology. Here, the notion of play is used as a way of thinking through the modern, fashionable body as one that is also explicitly open to engagement with reproductive technologies such as the camera, and addressed by a growing mass media.