Gender, Gaze, otherness and photography - WordPress.com · 2016-11-24 · • The male gaze is the way in which the visual arts and literature depict the world and women from a masculine

GENDER, GAZE, OTHERNESS AND PHOTOGRAPHYWITH REFERENCE TO CHAPTER 4 OF STUART HALL’S ‘THE SPECTACLE OF THE

OTHER’

GAZE• The definition of gaze is to “look steadily and intently, especially in admiration, surprise, or thought.”

• It is a term made famous psychoanalyst Jack Lacan – he said it is that the subject loses a degree of autonomy upon realizing that he or she is a visible object, he also referred to this

as the mirror stage. Lacan stated that “It illustrates the conflictual nature of the dual relationship." The gaze comments on the formation of the Ego via the process of objectification.

• The male gaze

is the way in which the visual arts and literature depict the world and women from a masculine point of view, presenting women as objects of male pleasure. The phrase male gaze

was coined by feminist film critic Laura Mulvey in 1975.

• The male gaze consists of three perspectives:

- that of the person behind the camera,

- that of the characters within the representation or film itself, and

- that of the spectator.

• The female gaze

Lorraine Gamman has suggested that a female gaze can be distinguished from that of a male through its displacing of power, not simply the inversion of the male gaze, which creates

the possibility of a multiplicity of viewing angles. In fact, for Gamman, “the female gaze cohabits the space occupied by men, rather than being entirely divorced from it.” Thus, for

Gamman, the role of the female gaze is not to appropriate the traditional male form of "voyeurism;" its purpose is to disrupt the Phallocentric power of the male gaze by providing

for other modes of looking.

• by the Lacan's first official contribution to psychoanalysis was the mirror stage, which he described as "formative of the function of the I as revealed in psychoanalytic experience."

By the early 1950s, he came to regard the mirror stage as more than a moment in the life of the infant; instead, it formed part of the permanent structure of subjectivity.

“DIFERENCE MATTER BECAUSE IT IS ESSENTIAL TO MEANING: WITHOUT IT, MEANING WOULD NOT EXIST” STUART HALL.

OTHERNESS SIMPLY IS THE DIFFERENCE BETWEEN OPPOSING

ELEMENTS: BLACK AND WHITE, WOMAN AND MAN, MASCULINE AND FEMININE.

DIANE ARBUS

• Diane Arbus was born on March 14, 1923, in New York City.

• She learned photography from her husband Allan Arbus.

• Known for her eerie portraits and off-beat subjects.

• Working with her husband, Diane Arbus started out in advertising and fashion photography.

• Arbus studied with photographer Lisette Model in the 50’s.

• Arbus began to pursue taking photographs of people she found.

• By the mid-1960s, Diane Arbus had become a well-established photographer. She became

friends with many other famous photographers, including Richard Avedon and Walker Evans.

• Her marriage to Allan Arbus ended in 1969, and she later struggled with depression. She

committed suicide in her New York City apartment on July 26, 1971.

CONT.

• “Everybody has that thing where they need to look one way but they come out looking another way and that’s what

people observe. You see someone on the street and essentially what you notice about them is the flaw. It’s just

extraordinary that we should have been given these peculiarities. And not, content with what we were given, we create a

whole other set… What I’m trying to describe is that it’s impossible to get out of your skin into somebody else’s.

And that’s what all this is a little bit about. That somebody else’s tragedy is not the same as your own“.

• “Freaks was a thing I photographed a lot. It was one of the first things I photographed and it had a terrific kind of

excitement for me. I just used to adore them. I still adore some of them, I don’t quite mean they’re my best friends but

they made me feel a mixture of shame and awe. Theres a quality of legend about freaks. Like a person in a fairy tale

who stops you and demands that you answer a riddle. Most people go through life dreading they’ll have a traumatic

experience. Freaks were born with their trauma. They’ve already passed their test in life. They’re aristocrats.”

NAN GOLDIN

• She is an American photographer and began taking photographs as a teenager in Boston, MA.

• Her earliest works, black-and-white images of drag queens, were celebrations of the subcultural lifestyle of

the community to which she belonged.

• During a period of study at the School of the Museum of Fine Arts in Boston, she began displaying her work in

the format of a slide-show, a constantly evolving project that acquired the title (appropriated from The

Threepenny Opera by Kurt Weill and Bertolt Brecht) The Ballad of Sexual Dependency in 1981.

• This collection of images had a loose thematic structure and was usually shown with an accompanying sound-

track, first in the clubs where many of the images were taken and then within gallery spaces. In the 1990s

Goldin continued to produce portraits of drag queens, but also made images of friends who were dying of

AIDS and recorded her experiences travelling in Asia.

• The latter resulted in a book and exhibition, Tokyo Love: Spring Fever 1994, a collaboration with the

Japanese photographer Nobuyoshi Araki - In this collection of portraits Goldin found a strong equivalent for

her Western community in the East.

• In 1995 she worked with the British filmmaker Edmund Coulthard to create a film about her life and work, I'll

Be Your Mirror (London, Blast! Films for BBC-TV, 1995).

• In 1996 Goldin's reputation was further enhanced by a highly influential retrospective, centred around The

Ballad of Sexual Dependency, at the Whitney Museum, New York.

LEE MILLER

• Born in New York in 1907.

• Became a successful fashion model in New York City in the 1920s.

• Travelled to Paris in 1929 and became surrealist photographer Man Ray's muse and

lover.

• Her circle of friends while in Paris included Pablo Picasso, Paul Eluard and Jean

Cocteau.

• She returned to New York in 1932.

• In 1934, she abandoned her New York studio to marry Egyptian businessman Aziz

Eloui Bey.

• The images she captured during her time in Egypt are considered her most striking

surrealist images.

• By 1937, Miller got bored of Cairo and moved to England, where she met British

surrealist Roland Penrose.

CONT.

• She began her career at Vogue.

• She was living in London during the outbreak of the Second World War, and worked closely

with American photographer David E. Scherman to capture the real life horrors of the war.

• One of the most iconic images from the collaboration was Scherman's image of Miller in

Hitler's bathtub in Hungary.

• After the war, Miller continued working with Vogue covering fashion and celebrities.

• She became clinically depressed and suffered from Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder, and began

to seek refuge in alcohol.

• In 1949, Miller and Penrose bought Farley Farm House in East Sussex following their

marriage in 1947.

• Recurring images from the war impacted Miller, causing a severe downward spiral in her

mental health, further accelerated by her husband's long time affair.

• Lee Miller died from cancer at Farley Farm House in Chiddingly, East Sussex, aged 70 in 1977.

SARAH MAPLE

• Born in 1986 to an Iranian Muslim mother and an English Christian raised father.

• She studied Fine Art at Kingston University.

• She won a competition in 2007, the aim of which was to "find the most exciting

and imaginative artistic talent in the UK" from graduating art students.

• Maple is heavily influenced by culture, TV, literature, music and comedy.

• She urges her audience to challenge traditional notions of religion, identity and the

societal role of women.

• "The aim of my work is to give my audience food for thought ... I choose to

portray my ideas through a light-hearted and tongue-in-cheek approach."

• In January 2012, Maple presented her work at the 'Art of Angel' alongside an

installation of artwork on the London Underground at Angel Tube station.

THE SPECTACLE OF THE OTHER HALL 1997

• Big focus on stereotyping.

• “Visual representation takes centre stage” - Speaks more about racial and ethnic differences – but says it

can be applied to all minority groups.

• “Representation… engages feelings, attitudes and emotions and it mobilises fears and anxieties in the

viewer, at deeper levels than we can explain in a simple, common-sense way.”

• “People who are in any way significantly different from the majority – ‘them’ rather than ‘us’ – are

frequently exposed to this binary form of representation. They seem to be represented through sharply

opposed, polarized, binary extremes – good/bad, civilized/primitive, ugly/excessively attractive, repelling

because different/compelling because strange and exotic.”

• Saussure – “we need difference because we can only construct meaning through a dialogue with the

‘Other’.”

THE SPECTACLE OF THE OTHER HALL 1997

• Richard Dyer distinction between typing and stereotyping. Argues that, without the use of

types, it would be difficult, if not impossible, to make sense of the world. We understand

the world by referring individual objects, people or events in our heads to the general

classificatory schemes into which – according to our culture – they fit. Typing is essential

to the production of meaning.

• We assign him/her to membership of different groups according to classs, gender, age,

nationality, race, linguistic group, sexual preference etc.