Photography projects, inspiration and research by Linda Mayoux
New York-based photographer Miru Kim is fascinated by city life.
Naked City Spleen series features Kim herself naked in city locations across the world, including New York, Paris
and Berlin.
The Pig That Therefore I Am.
http://vimeo.com/19871003
http://www.mirukim.com/photosPig.php
http://www.mymodernmet.com/profiles/blogs/naked-city-spleen-by-miru-kim-1
American photographer Laurie Toby Edison (born 1942) has engaged with gender and body image in her books:
Women En Large: Images of Fat Nudes (1994) and
Familiar Men: A Book of Nudes (2004).
More recent work includes Women of Japan which features clothed portraits of women from different social backgrounds.
Visit the website for more images and an insight into Edison’s practice:
http://laurietobyedison.com/video.asp
Listen to a video of Edison talking about the values and practice of her work:
http://video.google.com/videoplay?docid=-4596714865921868323&hl=en#
“As a self-made woman, an auto-didact to the core, I have always been screaming and shouting, trying to add my breath to the winds of change, which should shake off the lethargy of human kind to become a more loving race, where men and women, equally regarded, take control over their lives instead of being controlled by those in power….to take off the pressure of the never ending flow of images in my head I started to create through means of photography; using archetypes and ancient and new symbols alike to get my messages across, finding this a more subtle and effective way to get response and actually reach the hearts of people; we, you and I, can make change by being that change!”
Photographer (born 1976 in the Netherlands), like Cindy Sherman, uses both self-portraiture and dolls . Stone’s work is more distinctly feminist, however, as it frequently deals with the domestic lives of women, pregnancy and motherhood. She frequently uses props such as phones, dolls, teapots, clothing pins and other items identified with the domestic lives of women. Stone’s work plays with perspective and scale and is influenced by dreams or nightmares visualised through surrealism.
Rachel Stone @ http://www.lilithgallery.com/gallery/rachel_stone.html
For more of Stone’s work, visit: http://www.rachelstonephotography.com
Barbara Kruger (born 1945) studied alongside Diane Arbus but went into the field of graphic design and worked for numerous magazines. She developed what became her signature style
of work in the 80s when she stopped taking photographs and started to use American media sources for her images. She places banners across the images with direct, pithy and hard-hitting
phrases on them, often involving pronouns such as ‘I’, ‘you’ and ‘they’. Where Sherman’s images challenged aspects of modern society, these images were directly combative – often aimed at
YOU and placed so that you couldn’t avoid the question. Kruger did this by transforming normal white cube galleries into combat arenas and presenting her work as an installation.
The image below is not an installation but is equally direct, questioning female roles, identity
and task assignment.
I shop therefore I am 1987
As a photographer of people, you need to get to grips with the idea of identity and social constructions of identity. How you portray people will have ethical and moral implications. And you’ll need to create images that convey a particular truth or message, depending on the brief in hand.
An important strand in feminist art is the idea of selfhood – the individual who is lost within the objectifying image.
When we talk about our identity, we usually mean one of two identities:
These two short papers on self and identity give further perspective on this issue. The second link, in particular, examines the nature of self-identity through roles and its interaction with social identity formulated through group attachment or membership.
http://wat2146.ucr.edu/Papers/02a.pdf
http://wat2146.ucr.edu/papers/00a.pdf
Female photographers may choose to investigate the classic female roles of wife, mother and daughter and the expectations associated with these roles. For women there is a great deal of visual pressure through the use of manipulated images of women in fashion and PR situations. Women compare themselves unfavourably with the ‘false’ images they see, for example in the marketing of beauty products. A recent BBC website poll found that only 2% of UK women see themselves as beautiful.
Men also have dilemmas in terms of identity. Are they boys or men, fathers, husbands or sons? Are they role models or wasters? Writers or Romeos? Again, crucial components of identity that deliver self-worth and self-esteem. Think about men who over-train at the gym or use steroids to change their body shape. (Go on the internet and look for Howard Schatz and Beverly Ornstein’s photographs of Olympic athletes, for example.) These are all issues that have been explored in contemporary fine art photography.
Issues of identity are fertile ground for photographic investigation. Richard Billingham explored the effect that his father’s alcohol dependency and the consequent impact on his personality
had on family life.
Cindy Sherman has investigated a range of roles in her work – executive/employee, equal/object.
We can examine ourselves through the art of self-portrait and looking at how we wish to be seen – how we wish to define ourselves and how we are seen by others and how they would define
us. You could base a project on your own identity, asking ‘How am I perceived and is the treatment I receive in life, the interactions I like or dislike, related to the way people perceive me?’ There is also a lot of potential for project work in gender roles, society’s perceptions and expectations, and acceptance (or not) of different sexualities.We can also just use ‘things’ that we feel represent us, items that have the properties that we hold dear as signs of honesty or virtue, humour or fate. These images can be combined to form allegorical images of our personas.
Now that you’ve reached the end of this project on photography and feminism, try and produce an image that illustrates your feelings or approach to feminism using the technique of photomontage. It doesn’t matter whether you’re an active feminist or feel ambivalent or even hostile towards feminism in terms of producing this piece. Show your view!
Have a look at some Martha Rosler photos and photomontage to give you some ideas:
http://home.earthlink.net/~navva/photo/index.html
Choose a range of items that represent feminism as you see it and make a collage from photographs of your chosen items. Play with scale, perspective and colour. Black and white – spot colour – it’s your choice.
Feel free to use text to illustrate, i.e. as image rather than text. You can use parts of found images as long as the concept and major images are your own.
Your collages should be 2:1 ratio, i.e. twice as long as wide.
Write up the experience in your learning log or blog and comment on how well the two production methods worked.
In this exercise you’ll consider stereotypes and how they come into being – nurses are kind and caring, youths in hoodies are waiting to break into your car.
Use the same person to model several different roles, as Cindy Sherman has done in some of her photo-series. You’ll decide what they will be but one of them must be genuine. The aim here is to get people to question what a doctor or a student or a politician looks like. If you can, provide suitable outfits – from your own wardrobe, borrowed from friends or bought from a charity shop.
Produce a set of three images, two false, one true. Show them to as many people you can and keep a track on the results. Can people spot the genuine image? Look for a pattern. Do people want the person to be something other than what they actually are?
Write around 250 words in your learning log or blog reflecting on what you’ve found out about stereotypes and our need to ascribe characteristics to particular roles.
Guerrilla Girls, a feminist group fighting sexism in arts practice. Formed in New York in 1985, the
group maintain their anonymity by wearing gorilla masks and using the names of dead female artists as pseudonyms, e.g. Frida Kahlo and Hannah HÖch. They put pressure on organisations such as the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York by uncovering statistics that reveal the extent of patriarchy in the art world past and present. The original group disbanded in 2001 but several Guerrilla Girl spin-offs still exist. Recent campaigns include ‘Unchain female directors’ targeted at the male-dominated world of the Hollywood film studio.
Martha Rosler photos and photomontage to give you some ideas:
http://home.earthlink.net/~navva/photo/index.html
Write a 2,000-word essay (excluding any quotes) on one of the areas of landscape practice you have encountered during this course so far.The critical review is an opportunity for you to gain a greater insight into an area, theme, debate or other issue relating to landscape photography that is of particular interest to you.You must choose a topic that’s relevant to your own practice in some way, in order to help you to contextualise your practice and to show that your understanding of landscape photography is informed by relevant practitioners. You should include an in-depth evaluation of the work of key practitioners that you reference in your essay. Where appropriate, also reference your own individual images, bodies of work and ongoing or forthcoming projects.Your written work should clearly show that you have engaged with theoretical, historical and cultural debates around landscape practice within photography and visual culture, and demonstrate that you have developed academically as well as creatively.To sum up, your critical review should demonstrate that you can:• understand relevant topics and issues around landscape practice• use research skills competently• analyse appropriate resources• articulate your own, informed ideas at a level commensurate with HE5 level study.Remember to include:• correctly cited references and quotations (Harvard referencing system)• referenced illustrations• word counts, both excluding and including quotations.Finally, make sure that your essay is critical rather than narrative. This means that you should focus your efforts on evaluating, comparing, contrasting and questioning the work and theoretical ideas, and not on recounting biographical or historical information, unless it has a significant relation to practice.
My proposal is to do this around the idea of ‘safari’ – the way that African landscapes have been photographed and promoted, not only by Western tourists, but also African photographers.– Background to views of Africa in terms of exotic other – from anthropology and colonial accounts. Linked to discussions of the picturesque, but also beautiful and sublime ‘darkest Africa’– How this image has been and currently is promoted by both private and government-sponsored tourism. Equation of ‘Africa’ with animals and the ‘exotic primitive’ is even more pronounced than for most other regions.– How have African photographers responded. Many have followed the same trend as urban outsiders in the same way as urban populations in the UK idealise the British countryside. Particularly eg South Africa. Others have been more in the documentary tradition.– What are the implications for my own photographic practice in my work in Africa – different types of images for different markets? but what are the ethical issues.– What difference does it make if I ask people from the communities with which I work how they would want their lives and environment to be portrayed?Working method?Kander: working method: he does not plan everything in advance. But uses the photographic process as a means of discovering more and more what resonates with him. He went back to China 5 times, taking fewer but more focused pictures each time.I have started to review internet sites with ‘safari’ pictures, African photographers and my own earlier images of journey through Africa.Tutor responseYour thoughts for your Critical Review are very interesting – looking at the safari and colonialism. In your notes, there is a lot to examine in the list of things you mention. I suggest that you might be trying to pack too much into the essay, so getting a tighter focus would be better and would allow you to enter into greater critical depth. I would suggest your essay first addresses the topic fairly broadly – proposing the problems / criticisms, and then look at an example of work that fits into the traditionally ‘problematic’ approach, followed by a critique of a practitioner who is making a ‘better’ effort – or perhaps might actually not be making as good an effort as they might think, or their critics might think.(Sontag mentions safaris fairly near the beginning of On Photography – worth having a look.)There is also a good book, Photography and Africa by Erin Haney which might be worth looking athttp://www.amazon.co.uk/Photography-Africa-Exposures-Erin-Haney/dp/1861893825
My tutor thought that my first proposal is too broad (a lot of work!). Re-reading the task instructions I see the possibility of looking at and reviewing bodies of my own work. I would now like to focus much more narrowly on some of the challenges for my own practice, whether and how other photographers may have addressed them and/or any other ideas I myself could propose after this reflection. I want to focus on some issues I became interested in Assignment 2 ‘journeys’ but were left pending. Comparing the ways I might approach ‘journeys’ in UK (supposedly my ‘own’ society’) compared to the way I photograph journeys in Africa. This does raise some of the issues about ‘colonial gaze’ and travel photography in general, but I want to focus more on the challenges of photographing ‘journeys’ revisiting specific sets of images I have taken on journeys in Africa. Drawing on the way contemporary African and non-African photographers have depicted similar landscapes both as studied landscapes and as journeys/journey narratives.The word ‘safari’ means journey in Swahili from the Arabic root ‘safar’ travel. It was used by colonial powers to refer to game hunts. This is now being changed by African governments and tour companies to refer more to eco-travel to photograph national parks, but also African tourism more generally. I travel a lot for work, but unlike professional photographers am employed to do a job. I do increasingly have opportunities to do documentary portraits – now my photography skills are better. But, like a tourist, I have fleeting opportunities to do more contextual landscape or environmental work. I have a number of series of images taken on journeys from different perspectives taken before, during and since Assignment 2. These include:
This review is partly a way of really taking stock of the photographs I have and how they can be made more meaningful through selection, processing and narrative sequencing. Partly a way of comparing my images to those of professional photographers who have dealt with the same types of images. In order to draw implications for possibilities for my own practice in future. The questions that really interest me in order to make the best of the opportunities I have is:
This means getting less bound up with all the academic literature on colonialism and photography (which I started to read but seems a bit done to death) and focusing more on further investigation of ideas I had in Assignment 2 but applying these to my photography in Africa.