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.

‘Playing for the Camera’, in Images in Time
Aesa Sigurjonsdottir & Michael A. Langkjaer, eds.
Hard/Softcover, 220 pages
Published by Wunderkammer Press (1 September 2011)
Language: English
ISBN-10:0956646220
ISBN-13:978-0956646224