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).
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.
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.
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
- 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.
- 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.
- 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.
- Lemmon, Nadine. "The Sherman Phenomenon: A Foreclosure of Dialectical Reasoning." Discourse 16.02 (1993): 100-17. JSTOR. Web. 11 May 2013.
- 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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