“Cock your hat,” Frank Sinatra once observed, “angles are attitudes.” The two women in Regina Relang’s picture from the mid-50s have taken that advice to heart. Relang, a German photographer whose work was a fixture in Vogue and many other magazines for several decades, has constructed her picture like a scene from Desmond Morris’s The Human Zoo. The cafe, the coffee, the intimacy of the window seat speak of friendship and ease, but the beaky hat brims, the spiky eye makeup and the fall of light and shade suggest edgier, pecking-order forces of status and competition at play.
That edge is dramatised by a singular fact: one woman has a rope of pearls, and a swan neck on which to drape them, and the other doesn’t. She holds her beads across the dividing line of a window frame and Cinzano ashtray in the white-gloved hand of a curator showing off the priceless goods: look but don’t touch. The open mouth and downcast eyes of her friend seem to suggest a mix of disdain or envy or desire; in this, she shares common ground with the magazine’s imagined reader and the animating impulse of all fashion images: I want what she’s got.
Relang, who moved between Berlin and Paris before (and during) the war, was a pioneer of such playful narratives, the high-end storytelling of haute couture, which brought the models as well as their clothes (or hats) into sharper focus in the 1950s. She was self-taught and learned some of her dark-room technique from the celebrated war photographer Robert Capa. Her work is included in a new book and exhibition called Female View, which celebrates the women photographers who have challenged the “male gaze”, from the iconoclasts of the 1940s – Lee Miller, Madame d’Ora – to the self-dramatising Instagrammers of the present day.
• Female View: Women Fashion Photographers from Modernity to the Digital Age is published by Hatje Cantz (£38). To support the Guardian and Observer order your copy at guardianbookshop.com. Delivery charges may apply
• The exhibition runs at Kunsthalle St Annen in Lübeck, Germany until 3 July
