Final Analysis

Roger Hicks considers… ‘Shoe’, 1900-1914, by Harris & Ewing Inc

‘ This is an early example of how unpleasant and unnecessary advertising can be’

This was going to have been a portrait: a Kodachrome from the 1940s. I wanted to illustrate how much easier things are nowadays, with better colour, faster lenses, and much higher ISO speeds. But I got side-tracked. That’s one of the joys of browsing through the photographs in the Library of Congress.

In a sense it’s a strange choice; at first sight even a little fetishistic. Why on earth would anyone, except a fetishist, photograph a shoe? Well, advertising and fashion. How far is either separable from fetishism?

Second, who is going to look at the diamanté heels? The buckle: maybe. The heels? Come on. This is conspicuous consumption of the worst kind. It’s almost as if it’s designed to be photographed rather than worn.

Third, the shadows really aren’t too clever. That’s apart from the scratch and the ‘653’. Who cares? It’s probably going to be blocked out to a pure white background anyway. That’s an awful lot easier nowadays than it was in the days of hand retouching.

Fourth, the shoe itself is also going to need a fair amount of retouching. Look at the creases towards the toe and the wrinkles below the strap. When I was an assistant in an advertising studio we (= I, as assistant) spent a lot more time trying to select perfect samples than we (= the photographer) did in lighting and shooting the picture.

Fifth, could you sell a shoe in this way nowadays? Probably not. You’d need to associate it with a lifestyle that was impossibly glamorous or frivolous or ideally both.

Sixth, it’s still very clunky or clumpy by modern standards. As part of her degree in theatre, my wife Frances Schultz studied costume, and one of the standard works (Walkup’s Dressing the Part, Appleton- Century- Crofts Inc.) does not mention stiletto heels in 1950; though apparently (thanks, Wikipedia) they had appeared in fetish drawings in the 19th century.

The simple truth is that most of us just don’t bother to look very hard at old pictures. We glance at them; dismiss them as old; and don’t really bother to think about technique, context, or anything else much. This is an early example of how unpleasant and unnecessary advertising can be: of how it promotes the sin of covetousness. The joke is that this particular shot just doesn’t work any more.

Harris & Ewing Inc, incidentally, was a photographic studio founded in 1905 in Washington DC, and was in the 1930s the biggest in the USA. They gave most of their collection to the Library of Congress in 1955.

Roger Hicks has been writing about photography since 1981 and has published more than three dozen books on the subject, many in partnership with his wife Frances Schultz (visit his new website at www.rogerandfrances.eu). Every week in this column Roger deconstructs a classic or contemporary photograph. In AP 26 January he considers an image by Russell Lee