http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9Ezjd4bOwBc – Nick Knight Black and White for Vogue

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FXwm29epj7Y – Zach Gold String Theory

Ways Of Seeing, John Burger p.47

A woman must continually watch herself. She is almost continually accompanied by her own image of herself. Whilst she is walking across a room or whilst she is weeping at the death of her father, she can scarcely avoid envisaging herself walking or weeping. From earliest childhood she has been taught and persuaded to survey herself continually.

And so she comes to consider the surveyor and the surveyed within her as the two constituent yet always distinct elements of her identity as a woman.

She has to survey everything she is and everything she does because how she appears to others, and ultimately how she appears to men, is of crucial importance for what is normally thought of as the success of her life. Her own sense of being in herself is supplanted by a sense of being appreciated as herself by another.

One might simplify this by saying: men act and women appear. Men look at women. Women watch themselves being looked at. This determines not only most relations between men and women but also the relation of women to themselves. The surveyor of women in herself is male: the surveyed female. Thus she turns herself into an object -  and most particularly an object of vision: a sight.

I think this quote from Ways of Seeing really sums up the difference between these two videos. In the Nick Knight film, the model is moving from pose to pose without emotion, the only concern is to appear beautiful. However in the Zach Gold film the model is acting narratives and emotions which are inspired by the clothes she is wearing.
This is something we want to explore in our own work, we want to explore this non-narcissistic form of fashion imagery.