Tuesday, May 14

Self-Portrait Photography and Gender Pt.1


In this age of the internet and the boom of social networking, all rush to put a piece of themselves out there. We can see this all around us in the form of blogs, Facebook profiles, Twitter accounts, etc... Along with the internet and all the social networking sites came the introduction of the inevitable self-portrait or, as this modern era affectionately calls them—selfies. However, these so called “selfies” are not a product of our generation. If I had to say when they were created, I would say that they have been around ever since painters got the urge to represent themselves in paintings. It was this fascination with, “Seeking to be objective, showing the artist as he really is” (David Carrier 37) that drove these artist to attempt to capture themselves in their work. With the invention of camera artist no longer had to rely on the false representation that mirrors managed to display for them (Carrier 36). They now had a method to capture themselves as they were—or more notably, as they wished to be. In the years to come postmodern artist would use this new medium to make arguments about societal, economical, and political status in an attempt to garner the attention of the public eye on taboo subjects (John Pultz 143-144).
Untitled Film Still #13. 1978.
            One of the leading postmodern artist of the time, Cindy Sherman, completely redefined and set the standard for self-portrait photography. As Jennifer Dalton aptly put it into context, “Any photographer working with self-portraiture today is necessarily working in the long shadow cast by Cindy Sherman” (47). Sherman completely revolutionized the postmodern world with her Untitled Film Stills to be “heralded as the quintessential ‘postmodern’ artist” and one of the most sought after artist of her time (Nadine Lemmon 100). What was it about these self-portraits that caught the attention of so many people? It was because her work evoked questions and thoughts differing for every person, “critics applaud Sherman’s work… [While] simultaneously, critics partially negate her” (Lemmon 101). Sherman’s stills are multifaceted and multilayered, requiring a much deeper analysis to fully understand Sherman’s reasons for portraying women in this way.
            Taken at face value, these stills display the common female archetypes: “the sexy schoolgirl, the docile housewife, the femme fatale, the diva, the ice cold intellectual, and so on” (Anna Kérchy 181). This is exactly what we see in the pictures above. We can see the docile housewife striking a submissive pose as she looks beyond the camera. In another image we see what some might call the “sexy school girl” or the “ice cold intellectual” in a pretty seductive pose reaching for a book on the shelf. In one final image we experience the “femme fatale” as she poses in front of the mirror looking at someone outside the spectator’s viewpoint. On the surface, it would seem that Sherman frames herself in the, “role of the passive, silent, sexy other” (Kérchy 183) which is what angers some of her critics as she provides a, “woman [who] is always sexy to provide pleasure to the male gaze” (Kérchy 182). Yes, on the surface this is exactly what everyone sees, an overdramatic representation of the woman who satisfies the desires of men, “First it is woman, the essence of femininity that is perceived, seen, understood at the surface level” (Kérchy 183); however, Sherman’s true purpose is found once you peel back the layers under the essence of femininity.
Untitled Film Still #3. 1977.
            When we see one of Sherman’s still we see: Sherman the photographer, Sherman the imaginary actress, and Sherman the archetype of the essence of femininity. If we are to dig deeper into the images we begin to see an attack on the archetypes of femininity rather than a blatant attempt to objectify women. “In these pictures, femininity is played, repeated, acted out, put into quotation marks, differed by question marks, appearing as parody, drag, performance, a simulacrum in a society of spectacle, a copy, a copy of a copy, a copy of the defamiliarized, always-already social(ized) gender” (Kérchy 184).  It is this exact repetition of the same cultural and societal markers of femininity that subdues their effect. The fact all these archetypes are seen over and over again makes it an ironic ploy against the socially constructed ideas of femininity.The referent of Sherman's photos is not reality, but imaginary film, staged stills, which are not only re-presented, repeated, but also displaced, by becoming parodies of the active ‘original’” (Kérchy 185), this parody is the attack on the so called social norms of women. She is freed from the male gaze as her images bring attention to the image as a whole rather than the woman the picture objectifies. Nadine Lemmon quotes Lisa Phillips on saying, “Because Sherman is both the subject and object of these fictions, actress and director, image and author, she takes control of the dynamic that regulates desire . . . she deflects the gaze of desire away from her body toward the reproduction itself, forcing the viewers to recognize their own conditioning” (104). In other words, by looking at Sherman’s photographs, we do not see the archetypes of femininity she poses, but the social and cultural conditioning that we have been exposed to.
Untitled Film Still #14. 1978.
            The images force us to look upon ourselves and question the very feeling we may experience. On the surface, women typically find anger as they see the horrible fetishization of women who are portrayed as desirable objects for the male gaze. The men who analyzed Sherman’s work however acknowledge this. They understand that, Sherman being in control of the images and how they were staged, where done through the male camera to fulfill the desires of the male gaze (Anna Kérchy 181). Alas, looking deeper we see this deflection of the male gaze mentioned before, and we begin to realize that our gaze is on the reproduction itself. The reproduction of femininity and the cultural signifiers it implies are what Kérchy considers the studium as she takes a page out of Roland Barthes Camera Lucida. That being the case, the punctum becomes the female gaze. As stated before the men usually acknowledge that these images were created through a male perspective and thus fulfills and masculine desires; however, it is in the female gaze, the female spectator that we can understand the true meaning behind these photographs. I mentioned before that the women portrayed in these images seem to look beyond towards something outside the borders of these photographs, “The woman in Sherman’s photos looks above herself, somewhere upwards, beyond the frames of the picture” (Kérchy 187). Their gaze might look seductive or pleasing at first glance, but their gaze is much more than that. These women are caught “in moments of “meditation, of musing, daydreaming” (Kérchy 187). This is what their gaze represents. This meditation on these social constructs. Putting ourselves in the woman’s gaze, we begin to see inside these woman as they journey into reconstructing themselves. The traditional frames of womanhood and femininity are shatterd as they are exposed in this gaze. With this new look, femininity is revised and recreated into something unlike the once specified general roles (Kérchy 187-188). Something beyond patriarchal design, a new image of woman.

Bibliography
  1.  Carrier, David. "ANDY WARHOL AND CINDY SHERMAN: THE SELF-PORTRAIT IN THE AGE OF MECHANICAL REPRODUCTION." Notes in the History of Art 18.01 (1998): 36-40. JSTOR. Web. 11 May 2013.
  2.  Pultz, John. "Photography Since 1975: Gender, Politics, and the Postmodern Body." The Body and the Lens: Photography 1839 to the Present. New York: H.N. Abrams, 1995. 143-44. Print.
  3.  Dalton, Jennifer, Nikki S. Lee, Anthony Goicolea, and David H. Brown, Jr. "Look at Me: Self-Portrait Photography after Cindy Sherman." PAJ: A Journal of Performance and Art 20.03 (2000): 47-56. JSTOR. Web. 11 May 2013.
  4.  Lemmon, Nadine. "The Sherman Phenomenon: A Foreclosure of Dialectical Reasoning." Discourse 16.02 (1993): 100-17. JSTOR. Web. 11 May 2013.
  5. Kérchy, Anna. "THE WOMAN 69 TIMES: CINDY SHERMAN'S "UNTITLED FILM STILLS"" Hungarian Journal of English and American Studies (HJEAS) 9.01 (2003): 181-89. JSTOR. Web. 11 May 2013.

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