No artist who brews "Fancy Subjects for Pictorial Effects," as Cameron labelled some of her pictures, deserves to escape unscathed.
The women -somebody's wife, daughter, sister, niece -served mostly as models for "fancy subjects" (Cameron's label).
The same cannot, on the whole, be said of the hammy tableaux vivants that she called "My Fancy Subjects" — groups of figures illustrating scenes from myth, Shakespeare, Renaissance painting, the Bible, and Tennyson's "Idylls of the King".
Malcolm's account of Cameron's narrative "fancy-subject" photographs is one of the best I've read; for her, their pleasure lies in "the truth of the sitting" – the spectacle of seeing a bunch of Victorian housemaids, nieces and village children dressed as characters from the Bible or Tennyson, and all desperately trying to hold their poses – rather than in their technical accomplishment.
Students, meanwhile, have been lured away by fancy new subjects such as media studies and information technology.
Clothing, Joselit writes, "was no private affair, subject to fancy or the whim of the moment.
Mr. Priddy, who has spent two decades studying the subject of "fancy" ornamentation, is the author of the catalog (published by the Chipstone Foundation and Milwaukee Art Museum).
Perhaps it's the nippy cold that's blown into Paris this afternoon that's played a spell on his once-prickly-but-so-farserene mood, or the fact that given a soapbox, the man born Adrian Thaws is famously known to let rip on whatever subject takes his fancy for the day.
The subjects are all fancy clothes and studied attitude.
Elsewhere, and at the federal level, minimum wages are subject to the fancies of politicians and voters.Some agitators for higher pay focus on specific industries or companies, such as McDonald's.
Aira alternates between banal details of the family's everyday existence and intellectual flights of fancy that include such diverse subjects as the social structure of Pygmy communities and Aborigine myth.
