Fashioning Fiction

With Cindy Sherman, Kate Spade, Mathew Gray Gubler and Terrance Lindall

“Modeling is the next best thing to prostitution.” Yuko Nii

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Above: photomontage by W Magazine of the Kate Spade photo shoot. The shoot included Terrance Lindall as “Professor Lawrence” and the now famous Mathew Gray Gubler, star of Criminal Minds as his son. Mathew used to come to the WAH Center and show the movies he made while we sat on a couch and drank beer.

Read the Story of the photo shoot here on Mathew Gubler’s fan page: https://gramho.com/media/1957961262647605289 Mathew’s fan page: https://gramho.com/media/1957946933856451775

Copyright 2021 YNF

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FICTIONAL CHARACTERS

BY TERRANCE LINDALL

Gestalt, the Fiction that is our Life “Truth???..Whose truth?” Rudolph Guiliani “We are all just bundles of perceptions” David Hume

“Modeling is the next best thing to prostitution.” Yuko Nii “We are all fictional characters trying to realize ourselves.” Terrance Lindall

When you are young, if you live in a free society, you have many options to create the kind of person you want to fashion yourself to be. In high school I discovered academics and took college level courses in physics, English, calculus etc. and read all of Mark Twain, Theodore Dreiser and many other authors. I played chess and wanted to be a grandmaster, but was not good enough though I eventually defeated a Russian grandmaster at our art center. In college I wanted to be a professor of philosophy. But the time was of analytic philosophy that brought philosophy to a dead end. And now the Woke are decolonizing the course work and libraries, a new form of book burning, so I am glad to have escaped that cul de sac.

That was not for me. In my fictional imagination I was all of these things that I wanted to realize at one time or another. But one person cannot do all things.

In New York City where I am lucky to be, one bumps into many opportunities and if one has some expertise or talent or just plain charm and good looks, one can grab wonderful experiences. So with a little ambition I realized my fictional self into a “for real” famous horror comics cover artist and developed a rather large following. I even used my background in philosophy and illustration to do an extended riff off of my favorite poet John Milton whose books and books written about him will soon be “Woken” into the dustbin of Marxist decolonization.

Here is my experience as a high fashion model. They paid me thousands of dollars each day. If I had worked five days a week for a year, I could have earned half a million in a year, but I had other fish to fry.

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From the book promotion: “Fashioning Fiction in Photography since 1990, is a book that accompanied MoMA’s 2004 exhibition. Freedman, who collaborated intensely with Teller while he served as creative director at W, wrote of fashion photography’s power to “distinguish between stereotype and reality.” It exhibited the work of several of the world’s luminary fashion photographers whose work has been seen in every major fashion magazine and in many museums around the world. Also many of the models in the photographs were themselves celebrities in television or the arts. “

Yuko and I went to the opening and reveled with Hollywood stars and fashionistas. It was quite an event with limousines arriving every minute and people packed wall to wall.

The photographers in the show are international stars whose works are in major museums around the world: Cindy Sherman, Philip Lorca diCorcia, Cedric Buchet, Glen Luchford, Nan Goldin, Simon Leigh, Tina Barney, Juergen Teller, Larry Sultan, Ellen von Unwerth

At the opening we were photographed for the Getty Archives. We mingled with the stars from Hollywood and high fashion from around the world.

Great fashion photographers transcend what they are commissioned to present, creating a distinctive mood or dream. High fashion used to belong to the milieu of wealth and haute couture. Now millennial, x & z generation youth culture are inhabiting this domain with panache. Fashion still moves merchandise, but it has become an embodiment of who we are: Artful fashion photographers are a mainstream part of our arts culture.

Organized by Susan Kismaric and Eva Respini, “this is not your mother’s Vogue.” For example, in “The New Cindy Sherman Collection,” she depicts a series of demented models. In “The Clients,” Juergen Teller turns famous socialites into ordinary faces in the crowd. Photographers also adopt the private snapshot as in the Kate Spade shoot. The curators in the show at the MoMA in 2004 selected the work of thirteen who have created intriguing “fictions.”

The spaces in Mario Sorrenti’s photographs are so cluttered, so crowded with the junk of a low-­‐rent existence, that clean, elegant clothes become a surrealist afterthought.

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A fashion house needs, of course, to display their products in a desirable way.

That does not mean they cannot extend that work into the domain of fine art.

The requirements of the fashion house are not more limiting than those that a king, aristocrat in the bygone era of high art.

Nan Goldin, in a 1985 View, presented shots of ordinary women (at least one of them pregnant) lounging around the moldy Russian baths in lower Manhattan.

Tina Barney’s “New York Stories,” the models look like waxworks.

In Glen Luchford’s homage, something awful seems about to happen while wearing high fashion. Luchford shows a pair of cadaverous legs, but the shoes look exquisite on the corpse.

You too can buy a dream and a dress. Unsatisfied with a stale life, you can change identity. When you shop for clothes you want to make a statement about how you would like others to see you. But is that a fiction? Are you play-­‐ acting? Is it truth or are we fashioning fiction?

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The photo shoot was by Larry Sultan, a renowned photographer and artist/trustee of the San Francisco Museum of Art.

The Kate Spade Display at MoMA 2004

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This photo is by Larry Sultan in front of the Carlyle with Mathew Gray Gubler, Ann McGowan and Gray Gubler behind the camera, and myself.

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