PHILOSOPHY

Dear Friends and Colleagues,

I am pleased to announce the launch of THEO JOURNAL, a new fashion photography ZINE series.

Each issue of THEO JOURNAL centers on a single fashion model and unfolds like a small photobook, bringing together portraiture with landscapes, still lifes, and paintings. Taking the relationship between seeing and being seen as its point of departure, the series reflects on the dignity of its subjects and on the very conditions through which beauty comes into being.

Fashion models are perhaps the people whose profession is most purely defined by being seen. At the same time, they carry the historical weight of the Male Gaze within feminist discourse. Through this series, I quietly raise questions about the structures of that gaze and the relations of power embedded in the production of beauty.

Another important point of reference is Jakob von Uexküll's concept of Umwelt. As Uexküll wrote, "Every living being is a subject that lives in its own world, and this world is centered upon itself." Revisiting this idea in the age of AI, I explore new possibilities for fashion photography by bringing together perspectives from ecology, phenomenology, aesthetics, and feminism. At the same time, I seek to reconsider, through fashion photography, some of the questions contemporary aesthetics continues to confront whenever it speaks of beauty and the gaze.

For contemporary aesthetics, fashion photography remains an unfamiliar language; for fashion photography, contemporary aesthetics is equally unfamiliar. By allowing these two discourses to intersect, I hope each may offer the other a way beyond its existing impasses. Just as Maurice Merleau-Ponty turned to Cézanne, and Gilles Deleuze to Francis Bacon, philosophy and art have long been close companions. THEO JOURNAL aspires to be a place where the two can meet—a space for dialogue, experimentation, and collaboration that grows together with the artists, thinkers, and audiences who choose to take part.

It is my sincere hope that this new project will be warmly received and become, however modestly, a source of guidance for those engaging with the questions and challenges they each encounter.

TISCH Founder & Editor, THEO JOURNAL