The Neo-Gothic Revival in modern photography. The intention of this essay is to define my own work and place it within a critical context. I will be looking at art history and how it has helped to shape and define modern media.

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His most famous painting, The Nightmare, is often interpreted as a punishment of the woman Fuseli fell in love with but whom later rejected him. It shows a young woman sprawled on her back on a bed, with an ominous looking horse peering through the curtains and a gargoyle like creature, known as an incubus sitting on her torso “It is a demon that haunts the dreams of young women and is the male counterpart of a succubus” Dreams were a common subject for Fuseli; he and author Edgar Allan Poe had a fascination with the subconscious.

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Director Ken Russell used the imagery in Fuseli’s Nightmare for his 1986 film poster Gothic, a fictional tale whereby two famous novels were dreamt up, Frankenstein and The Vampire. The poster is a clear and direct representation of Fuseli’s painting, the fair beauty with her golden locks draped over the bed in her white dress, helpless as a strange, creepy figure crouches on her chest seemingly transfixing her in this dreamlike state.

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Another of Fuseli’s famous painting’s, titled Silence, also has an overwhelming sense of dreamlike melancholy. It is occupied by a single, strong, simple figure sitting cross-legged and bent right over itself, composed into a self-enclosed shape. As far as a human body can be, it's rolled up into a ball. Around it there's a void of non-specific gloom, the figure appears to be huddled in the corner of what could be a dungeon or cell; or this could be a metaphor for feeling trapped, meaning the faceless figure is representative of anyone willing to interpret into their own understanding. “It's an archetypal figure, personifying a very fundamental state of the human mind.”

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Sigmund Freud’s theories were and still are extremely influential. He “is best known for his theories of the unconscious mind”. Freud argued in his famous essay ‘The Uncanny’ that certain sights arouse horror, because of an “uncertainty whether an object is alive or not”. He goes on to explain the concept of feeling something familiar yet unusual at the same time, thus resulting in it being uncomfortably strange. During a time when everyone believed in the supernatural, Freud explored peoples unconscious thoughts and expanded the thinking about the world. Gothic tales attempted to bring to the surface the truths about ourselves that often stayed hidden or unexplored. Given all this, it is easy to see how Freud’s notion of the uncanny can be found in Gothic art and literature. 

Artists often got their inspiration from authors such as Horace Walpole and Edgar Allan Poe. Tales that belong to typical Gothic literature revolve around mysterious castles, remote areas, murder, treachery, superstitions and curses. Gothic literature is also about villains, terrifying monsters, vampires, ghosts, devils and demons. There is a distinct similarity between these horror stories and the terrifying paintings of Fuseli.

Writers welcomed this movement; their stories would combine elements of both horror and romance. A mad passion between the characters incorporated with ghosts and cursed dark Gothic buildings. “Death is central to the gothic imagination”. Walpole is believed to have invented this genre with his novel The Castle of Otranto which gained immense popularity and became the trendsetter for other authors of Gothic style literature. The English author decided to redesign his country home in the medieval Gothic style, becoming a model for Gothic Revival architecture.

The Victorians embraced the supernatural and death; photographers began to experiment with photomontage and double exposures and would create images sometimes made using a large number of negatives, which was an extremely advanced technique for the time. Images such as Henry Peach Robinson’s Fading Away, is a composition of five negatives, of a young girl dying of tuberculosis with her family members at her bedside.

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Photographing the dead to look as though they were alive was also extremely popular in the Victorian era; mostly they would be babies, posed peacefully in their cribs, occasionally with other family surrounding the crib, like a typical family photo.

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With the invention of the moving image in the late 19th Century, it wasn’t long before horror films were being made. The most notable and sometimes credited as being the first horror film is that by Georges Meilies titled Le Manoir du Diable translated as The House of the Devil. This silent movie isn’t scary and wasn’t intended to be, its intension was to make the audience laugh. The content follows the Gothic vibe and includes a bat that transforms into a person and ghosts and objects that suddenly appear then disappear. Stop animation is seen now as a simple technique for making a film but the Victorian viewers where mystified by it.

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When analysing the photographic image, Bathes argues that an image is made up of signs and codes; he explored these meanings and the way in which people read them. His theory “is a common technique applied in the critical analysis of photographic meaning”. The word ‘Goth’ nowadays conjures up many different mental images; artists, photographers and musicians use their own interpretations within their work. Barthes breaks these codes down by applying semiotics. He uses connotation and denotation as a way of understanding these signs, quite simply “denotation is what is photographed, connotation is how it is photographed”

The Gothic was again revived in the United Kingdom around the early 1980’s as a subculture of the Punk scene. This anarchist youth culture rejected anything mainstream in its entirety; it acted as a source of inspiration for artists and musicians and is almost always associated with horror. Music dramatically changed its style when Gothic rock became a kind of a category within the post punk genre. Most artists who used the Goth subculture as a base for their works mainly used romantic and mystic images. The Goths, as we know today are known to have a strong fascination for the dark and mysterious also a kind of romanticism. Gothic fashion has been associated with dark clothing, dyed black hair and black fingernails. “Throughout world history, black has been associated with night and darkness and, by extension, with death, danger and evil. The devil has long been known as the prince of darkness” Individual tastes, like with any subculture, would come into play, some Goths would favour fishnets and the lacey fashions of the 18th century costumes, while other Goths prefer a more industrial or leather based style.

Vivienne Westwood is seen as one of the first fashion designers to bring the Punk and Goth style of the 1970’s and 1980’s into high fashion and “revolutionised the Punk fashion culture” The classic Punk style included safety pins, facial piercings, spiky hairstyles and deliberately revolting clothes.

As you can see, the Gothic subculture was and is still different from mainstream for various reasons. It was seen as a new phenomenon that was completely different to mainstream culture and so was given the ‘barbaric’ name and association. The Gothic subculture has therefore faced a lot of criticism. It is probably due to certain misconceptions that have led to a mysterious cloud to surround this Gothic culture, which seemed to run through the veins of most creative genres.

i-D magazine was founded in 1980 by Terry Jones, a British graphic designer who was an art director for vogue. It was aimed towards the rapidly growing youth and street culture, reflecting Britain at the time. The magazine is known for its innovative photography and typography and clearly helped to influence and define magazine and advertising design but also the Punk and Goth scene.

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“The idea was to break down the pigeon-holing of identity and fashion; to go beyond the façade of fashion so you could play it as a game. So you could have more fun with the codes of fashion.” Terry Jones.

During the late 1990’s it became recognised as a new artistic style. Artist and writer Charles Alexander Moffat, wrote The Neo-Gothic Art Manifesto and so the term Neo-Gothic was applied to this movement, which emphasises the bizarre, obscene, mysterious and horrific. Moffat remains one of the driving forces behind the style as an artistic movement.

The Neo-Gothic style has made many appearances on the catwalks and in high fashion magazines, fashion designers all over the world like Alexander McQueen, John Galliano and Yohji Yamamoto have been inspired by the dark aesthetic and combined this into their collections.

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The gothic influence from the 1980’s has never died out and is still a huge inspiration for current fashion designers, artists and photographers. Some of the main photographers who regularly shoot for high fashion magazines such as i-D, Vogue and Dazed and Confused include Jean-François Campos and Steven Meisel. They have created work with a darker aesthetic, and are all very unique and different to what seems to be in most of the high street fashion spreads nowadays, as this is a way of rebelling against mainstream and so stands out as something different.

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This body of work by Jean-François Campos consists of 12 images and appeared in Flair magazine, for which Campos shoots a lot. It is his use of lighting and location that really caught my attention as well as the captivating narrative of the girl and the strange white figures. It is very reminiscent of Fuseli’s work and clearly has a gothic vibe.

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Steven Meisel produced this fashion editorial for Vogue Italy, shot in 2005 inspired by the film Sin City. Meisel uses a basic colour palette of muted, de-saturated hues and, his use of lighting creates an eerie atmosphere within the even eerier location. Gothic literature in the 18th Century however, focuses on the female figure being a much more submissive and helpless character, dominated by the male characters. Sin City director, Frank Miller has his own interpretation and reverses the roles of dominance yet still manages to objectify the woman having them wear next to no clothes. “There are numerous films about the empowerment of women and their drive and dedication for independence, but, for the most part, women have been relegated to the role of ‘eye candy’”.

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My own photography has always has a very dark aesthetic and the subject within my images has usually steered towards more of an alternative feel. I incorporate a gothic theme expressing issues around objectification and voyeurism and I take a lot of my inspiration from artist Henry Fuseli and Photographer Steven Meisel, especially their use of light within their images and how this can evoke certain emotions of the viewer.

I have a developed a de-saturated hyper real technique with my recent work. I feel that this complements the subject matter, as well as enhancing my interpretation of the gothic theme.

As we have seen, gothic themes are often used in a contemporary fashion context. In my current project I will be replicating the works of Henry Fuseli and incorporating them into a fashion advertising campaign. However, I will use my contemporary style to bring the works into a modern context.  

It is clear to see what influence the Gothic in the 12th Century has had on future developments of the term ‘Goth’ even if the original meaning of the style has effectively been forgotten. Many People within the art circle, from fashion designers to film makers, find it equally as interesting, each interpreting it as their own and creating something unique. As for photography, gothic themes run throughout contemporary high-end fashion magazines, such as photographer Steven Meisel producing gothic inspired advertising and editorials. Today’s society sees Goth’s as social outcasts, yet photographers and fashion designers use this faux pas to instigate shock from their audience and recognition for producing a piece of work that stands above mainstream fashion.

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