Photography and the Body

What Factors Influence a Photographer’s Interpretation when Representing the Body, and Why? Luke Harrison

What Factors Influence a Photographer’s Interpretation when Representing the Body, and Why?

What Factors Influence a Photographer’s Interpretation when Representing the Body, and Why?

An Investigation into Two Female Photographers Dealing with the Body at Crucial Times in Twentieth Century Photographic Practice.

Luke Harrison.

Contents Page

List of Illustrations

p. 4

Introduction

p. 5

Chapter 1: The Personal Image

p. 14

Chapter 2: The Media Image

p. 25

Conclusion

p. 37

Bibliography

p. 42

List of illustrations 1. Portland. Minor White, 1940. Pultz, J., Photography and the Body.

London: The Orion Publishing Group, 1995, pp.111.

2. Thomas Carlyle, profile. Julia Margaret Cameron, 1867. Badger, J., The Genius of Photography, How photography has changed our lives. London: Quadrille Publishing Ltd, 2007, pp.31.

3. The Chiffonier. Clarence White, 1904. Clarke, G., The Photograph.

New York: Oxford University Press Inc., 1997, pp.124.

4. Blessed Art Thou Among Women. Gertrude Kasebier, 1903. Philippi, S. (ed), Alfred Stieglitz, Camera Work, The Complete Illustrations 1903-1917. KĂśln: Taschen, 1997, pp.96.

5. Symphony in White, No. 2: The Little White Girl. James McNeill Whistler, 1864. Pyne, K., Modernism and the Feminine Voice, O’Keeffe and the Women of the Steiglitz Circle. London: University of California Press Ltd., 2007, pp.9.

6. Mother and Child. Gertrude Kasebier, 1903. Pultz, J., Photography and the Body. London: The Orion Publishing Group, 1995, pp.48.

7. A Play of Selves, Act 1, Scene 10. Cindy Sherman, 1975. Bonami, F. (ed), Cindy Sherman. Milan: Mondadori electa, 2007, pp.11.

8. Untitled (My Face is Your Fortune). Barbara Kruger, 1982. Warner Marien, M., Photography: A Cultural History. (Third Edition). London: Laurence King Publishing Ltd., 2010, pp.152.

9. Untitled Film Still #21. Cindy Sherman, 1978. Sherman, C., Galassi, P., Cindy Sherman: The Complete Untitled Film Stills. New York: The Museum of Modern Art, 2003, pp.35.

10. Untitled Film Still #6. Cindy Sherman, 1977. Sherman, C., Galassi, P., Cindy Sherman: The Complete Untitled Film Stills. New York: The Museum of Modern Art, 2003, pp.143.

“What factors influence a photographer’s interpretation when representing the human body, and why?”

‘No longer a simple object of visual delight and innocent erotic delectation, the body is now understood to be the site of a highly charged debate.’1 Since its grand inception some 150 years ago, photography’s impact on society has been profound and has cemented itself into our culture whilst enriching it. Photography ushered in a more modern and distinct way of recording and representing the world than its less mechanised predecessors. By 1850, photography was deeply at odds with itself. It was assumed to be variously an art, a risk to art, a science, a revolutionary means of education, and a threat to social order. For some, photography promised a modern, violence-free class revolution achievable through the democratic dissemination of knowledge, until now available only to the privileged. Others envisioned a social deterioration in which the middle class, bursting with visual fantasies of reality, would reject accepted values and become a breed of egotistical, self-justifying voyeurs.

So it can be intimated that technology, attitudes and ultimately society transformed with the development of photography. During its infancy, photography was celebrated for its ability to produce swift and precise images of what was in front of the lens, which inevitably allowed for a new visual discourse to emerge and define itself toward the end of the nineteenth century and throughout the twentieth century and beyond. The rapid extension of technologies to new social, cultural, political, and economic institutions through invention, innovation and discovery, meant photography could probe deeper (literally and metaphorically) than ever before; it seemed nothing would escape the camera’s gaze.

Throughout the twentieth century critical theory attempted to reflect, value and organize the significance in looking at photographs and images in relation to a host of diverse factors, such as gender, race, class, sex, psychoanalysis, art history, ideology, politics and so on. Furthermore, within this specific century a vast archive of photographic imagery was formed, serving the numerous branches of technology, commerce, government, science, medicine, entertainment, art and memento. One of the richest and most diverse realm’s of

photography, imagery of the human body, accumulated within the twentieth century. This was predominantly due to a radical shift in attitudes toward the body, the reasoning spans a complex host of factors including social, political and cultural. A full explanation is clearly beyond the range of this introduction, but the rise during this period of ‘…physical culture which may be seen in large part as a reaction to the threat presented by an increasingly machine-dominated society…’2 is significant.

The rise of photography as a fundamental social construct and its importance in communicating messages and ideas was outlined in the first quarter of the twentieth century by the highly revered master artist and photographer László Moholy-Nagy: ‘A knowledge of photography is just as important as that of the alphabet. The illiterate of the future will be ignorant of the use of a camera and pen alike.’3 The scope of this investigation will incorporate the twentieth century because it is the sole complete century that photography has lived through to date. This will provide me with sufficient breadth to investigate the factors that influence a photographer’s interpretation in representing the human body, spanning from early modernism through to postmodernism.

Authoritative and radical debates in recent years that have come about in relation to ideas of representing the human body still resonate today in contemporary practice, seen in the work created

by John Coplans and the late British photographer Jo Spence, both challenging cultural assumptions. The rise of feminist and postmodern thinking has injected life and energy back into photographic practice concerning the body in the visual arts, and the subject is constantly being unpicked, revised and reconfigured. I would argue that depending on how and by what means a body is represented can give rise to more significant answers than stylistic examination. For instance, rather than isolating the developments in technique and style as a tool for the critical analysis of photographs, the methodology that would reap better understanding would be a more pluralistic one, incorporating and drawing ideas from Marxism to the psychoanalytical theories of Freud, sociology, culture, history, literature, anthropology, and art and its own history.

This dissertation will investigate how and why photographic representations of the body formulate and reflect not only sexuality,

gender and issues of personal identity, but also, and more fundamentally issues of ideology, power and politics. To do this I have isolated two specific photographic artists, who have both practised photography at different periods of the twentieth century. Roughly dividing the century into half, early and late, I will use the work of these specific practitioners to investigate the photographic representation of the body in the context of that particular period within the twentieth century.

I have chosen two female photographers to illustrate the two different sections in the investigation: one photographer per section, a section being early and the other the late twentieth century. I have decided to chose all female photographers because I would argue that it will afford a better chance in acquiring valuable answers in relation to the subject; the representation of the body. My conviction is that male photographers have immortalised the pages of history in relation to their work about the human body via a vast abundance of publications and literature. I would also argue that women photographers have a more quiet though significant relationship with how and why they represent the human body. So on balance, I believe women will give me a refreshing insight that will yield richer and alternative answers to that of a male perspective.

Laura Mulvey’s seminal essay based on the theories of Jacques Lacan published in 1975; Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema is important to mention here as this will act as part of a theoretical grounding for this writing. Though not foolproof, her essay was groundbreaking and influential at the time, and still resonates today, though the potency of it is something slightly more diluted, as discussions have become more complex. Although it emerged from feminist theoretical assumptions and was applied to narrative cinema, it did in fact transcend the visual arts, and was integrated into cultural studies and theoretical frameworks. The essay was important in exposing the relationship between men and women in the context of ‘the gaze’4 and visual culture. As Mulvey explains; ‘In a world ordered by sexual imbalance, pleasure in looking has been split between active/male and passive/female.

The determining male gaze projects its fantasy onto the female figure, which is styled accordingly. In their traditional exhibitionist role women are simultaneously looked at and displayed, with their appearance coded for strong visual and

erotic impact so that they can be said to connote to-be-lookedat-ness. Women displayed as sexual object is the leitmotiv of erotic spectacle…she holds the look, plays to and signifies male desire.’5 Mulvey emphasised that these differences took the form of inequality and oppression within a capitalist, but more specifically, patriarchal, society. It is these ‘blockages’ towards women within art history and visual culture that bring about radical and noteworthy responses through photographic practice. Even applied retrospectively I believe utilising female photographers will help significantly in presenting how and why photographers represent the body, and the influences and intentions that govern this.

Debates about ‘the gaze’ rage on: ‘men look at women. Women watch themselves being looked at. This determines not only most relations between men and women, but also the relation of women to themselves.’6 Berger acknowledges the ‘look’ in this statement which raises an important question, and touches on something briefly mentioned previously, that ‘the gaze’ or ‘the male gaze’ is not foolproof. For instance, women can gaze at one another, and women can gaze at men in a way that runs parallel to Mulvey’s prophetic essay. Since the initial discussions surrounding the relationship between power and powerlessness of the spectator and the spectacle with regards to gender, there has been a need to develop a more complex debate: ‘…A number of questions occur. How does the women look?

Is she forced to share the way of seeing of the man, or might there be a specifically female gaze? Can the man too be the object of the gaze? Can such a clear distinction be made between male and female, masculine and feminine?’7 The photographer Minor White made a photograph in 1940 that demonstrates this clearly and effectively.

fig.1. Portland. Minor White, 1940.

The photograph made by Minor White (fig.1.) is in keeping with the conventions of the eroticised female body. The subject glances downward suggesting a submissive role, and with the absence of eye confrontation from the subject, the male body becomes a sexualised object to be gazed at with a controlling look.

In summary, the investigation will unpick the cultural assumptions in society, looking at how specific practitioners have responded and challenged these ‘blockages’ for women that have been implemented in cultural and photographic history by a dominating patriarchal society. For example, the Victorian amateur photographer Julia Margaret Cameron was among the first to experiment artistically with the photographic medium. Although she didn’t challenge the patriarchal society of the Nineteenth Century directly, she did challenge the accepted and established conventions of portraiture of the time. She broke the rules of 1860’s photographic practice and was widely criticised for it; at a time when taste demanded grandiose, sharp, painstakingly composed images, she produced photographs more in touch with spiritualism and a Pre-

Raphaelite aesthetic ideology; soft focus, poetic meaning, and portrait profiles filling the whole frame. (See fig.2.)

fig.2. Thomas Carlyle, profile. Julia Margaret Cameron, 1867.

I would argue that Cameron challenged the ‘blockages’ of accepted photographic practice and taste of the period by creating progressive work that was retrospectively significant and also noteworthy at the time in that it created acceptability for women to use the camera to shape new images of themselves, to create new histories and give shape to new social relations. From this I would further argue that women at this time had almost equal footing when it came to photographic practice but did not share the burden of established conventions that her male colleagues did ‘…because women generally did not have the identity and authority in the cultural and intellectual world enjoyed by men…’8 It was felt at the time that it was a necessity for a patriarchal society to promote its desires and expose its fears through objectifying the female form in photographic images: the ‘phallocentric gaze.’9 The focus of this investigation will centre on how and why they challenged pre-conceptions and assumptions in society and culture – the ‘blockages’.

As I have outlined previously, the two chapters of this essay will correspond to a particular period in the twentieth century; early

and late, and these periods will be investigated through the work of particular photographers.

Chapter one will explore the work of photographer Gertrude Kasebier in the context of early twentieth century photographic practice and within the framework of the socio-political climate at that time. The theme I will investigate in chapter one will be, The Personal Image. By this I mean the intimate, the maternal and the family photographs often created in private space. Analysing specific photographs Kasebier made in the early part of the twentieth century will enable me to expose the reasoning and influences that shaped her interpretation in representing the body. The chapter will also outline how she challenged accepted conventions and attitudes in art and society, and the role femininity played.

Chapter two will focus on a photographic theme prevalent in the mid to late-mid twentieth century: that of The Media Image. By this I mean the media’s construction of the representation of the body that extends these blockages in a patriarchal society originating from within nineteenth century pre-occupations with domesticity and the role of women. I will explore and analyse the work of the photographer Cindy Sherman, and the role Postmodernism played in giving rise to many practitioners that sought to confront radically and boldly the blockages implemented in social and visual history of which Sherman was no exclusion. I will analyse her photographs in the context of this period of the twentieth century in an attempt to unpick and reveal the reasons that motivated and influenced her work and how she came to realise her interpretation in representing the body. The focus will be cast equally on how her photographs challenged the established conventions and cultural assumptions of the time as well as underlining the fact that her images are self-portraits and what the utilisation of her self-image actually means as a political tool.

References 1. Pultz, J., Photography and the Body. London: The Orion Publishing Group, 1995, pp.7.

2. Ewing, W. (ed), The Century of the Body, 100 Photoworks 1900 – 2000. New York: Thames and Hudson, 2000, pp.18.

3. Wells, L. (ed), Photography: A Critical Introduction. (Third edition).

Oxon: Routledge, 2004, pp.10.

4. ‘The Gaze’; is a psychoanalytical term brought into popular usage

by Jacques Lacan to describe a condition where the mature autonomous subject observes “the observation of himself” in a mirror. In cinema theory, Laura Mulvey identifies the ‘Male Gaze’, in sympathy with the Lacanian statement that “Woman is a symptom of man.”

5. Mulvey, L., ‘Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema’ (London, 1975), pp.6-18, in Harrison, C. (ed), Wood, P. (ed). Art in Theory 1900-2000, An Anthology of Changing Ideas. (Second edition). Oxford: Blackwell Publishing Ltd., 2002, p.986.

6. Berger, J., Ways of Seeing. London: Penguin Classics, 2008, pp.41.

7. Williams, A., ‘Re-reviewing the look: Photography and the Female Gaze’, Ten.8, No.25, pp.4-11, in Wells, L. (ed). The Photography Reader. Oxon: Routledge, 2003, p.325.

8. Warner Marien, M., Photography: A Cultural History. (Third edition).

London: Laurence King Publishing Ltd., 2010, pp.94.

9. ‘Phallocentrism’; is a critical theory term coined by Jacques Derrida to refer to the privileging of the masculine (phallus) in the construction of meaning. Laura Mulvey identifies phallocentrism and uses it in her seminal essay ‘Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema’ to describe male domination over women in society.

Chapter One

The Personal Image.

Gertrude Kasebier was a championed turn-of-the-century pictorialist photographer born in 1852. The photographic movement ‘Pictorialism’1 reached its height in the early years of the twentieth century in New York, and of which Kasebier was an integral part. She sought to extend a similar way of thinking about photography to that of Julia Margaret Cameron (fig.2). This meant she adopted the aesthetic sensibility of this period: soft and hazy focus, and painterly qualities created by brushing directly onto the photographic image to inject the acceptability of art into it and to enable meaning to transcend the glossy surface of the image. This was seen as emulating the painting styles of the nineteenth century masters, such as J.M.W. Turner and J.M. Whistler. I would argue that this acceptability was formulated by the progressive and poetic work of Cameron in the mid-to-late nineteenth century that still resonated with photographic practitioners of both sexes.

Kasebier’s career began mid-life after she had given birth to her three children and subsequently raising them herself. This particular role of motherhood, and the relationship between a mother and her children in the domestic sphere would form the core themes in her work, as I will outline later. As well as this, Kasebier began to practise photography seriously at a time when ideology and intention centred on ideas of ‘…artistic photography and spiritual portraiture.’2 Kasebier enrolled in art school at the Pratt Institute at the modest age of thirty-seven in 1889. There she learnt painting and drawing and she would have come into contact with educational philosopher Friedrich Froebel’s ideas that were taught at the institute. Friedrich Froebel3 and his teachings would form the basis for the growing Kindergarten movement, in short emphasising the importance of a child’s early relationship with independence and education in their development.

I would argue that this shaped Kasebier’s concerns and priorities early on in her career. With the inclusion of other factors as well, such as being involved in the progressive reformist politics of femininity, and with being a mother, formed the subject matter and ideas for her original photographic work. As the photographer and writer Gretchen Garner points out, ‘…so as both Mother and a student it is likely that Kasebier had encountered them…Froebel’s deeply spiritual ideas may have supplied the animating philosophy to Kasebier’s otherwise not particularly religious life…’4

The cultural milieu in the early part of the twentieth century was one that was still very much an extension of nineteenth century pre-occupations and attitudes in terms of class, race and gender.

However In America as well as Britain, the women’s civil rights movement and the Suffragette movement was gathering momentum and authority. Freud and Einstein published their theses in the early part of the twentieth century, changing the face of psychology and physics respectfully. The rapid and lavishly funded industrious actions of Western Europe and America in the nineteenth century came to fruition at differing times during this period, which transformed and transported society into the new modern mechanised world. The visual arts also had a shake-up, Cubism was an avant-garde art movement established by Pablo Picasso and Georges Braque, which was formed in Europe at the beginning of the century. It revolutionised European painting, and influenced music, literature and also various modern photographers of the times, such as Paul Strand and Edward Weston, utilizing formal shapes and grids in their images of the modern world.

This rich tapestry of discovery, invention and innovation that was typical of the twentieth century set the way for artists and visual practitioners to carve out their own modern identities and realities through their work, often controversial as it challenged the contemporary social regime and conventions. Despite all the social change that occurred, the rigid pillars of the Euro-American class structure stood firm, including attitudes regarding the place for women in society. As the professor of Art History Kathleen Pyne outlines, ‘While in the nineteenth century the feminine had been placed outside modernity in a separate premodern domain, in the early years of the twentieth century women had to negotiate their way out of that enclosure into modernity, to make space for themselves there as producers, not just as consumers or public women of a demimonde.’5 To illustrate this point further, that of the carrying-over of attitudes, or of these blockages towards women, into the twentieth century, I have chosen a photograph produced in 1904 by the male photographer Clarence White, also a pictorialist and friend of Gertrude Kasebier.

fig.3. The Chiffonier. Clarence White, 1904.

This quintessential photograph (fig.3.) is a typical late nineteenth-early twentieth century portrait of a woman where the female figure is totally passive. White photographs from above which exemplifies his dominance over the event, while the subject submissively and casually glances down. The interior setting suggests domesticity and private space, and the woman ultimately becomes an object to be stared at. The wider implications of this image are that of how men viewed women, and how women saw themselves, and attitudes to social freedom and placement in a patriarchal society.

Essentially, how the body is represented in photography signifies social and cultural implications. ‘Soft-focus and passive poses hide, as it were, an underlying structure of female stereotypes in relation to male fantasy and expectation. The woman is to be looked at in her dual role as spectacle (for the male gaze) and stereotype (mistress, wife, mother, and so on). These are demure images with the female subjects rarely looking at the camera. Their downward, sideways or averted eyes represent them as objects to be looked at, framed within a specific symbolic iconography.’6

This brief extract regarding White’s image (fig.3.) written by the artist and writer Graham Clarke, presents the image itself as testament to the validity of Laura Mulvey’s seminal essay written nearly seventy years after this image was taken. The essay outlined in the introduction made evident these cultural blockages for women by a patriarchal society entrenched in particular attitudes.

The photographic milieu at the turn of the century and into the early part of the twentieth century incorporated the amateur snapshooter, the professional portraitist, and the serious photographic artist. Excluding the straight institutional use of photography such as police identity photographs, Kasebier had been involved with all three demographics at some point in her career. On the one side there was George Eastman and the Kodak Brownie that was released in 1900 and revolutionised photography; the one-dollar, small, light and hand-held camera solidified itself as a beacon of triumph for the proletariat. On the other side there was the Impresario Alfred Stieglitz and his tireless vision of photography and modern art, his strict ideology visualised as pictorialism. ‘As George Fisher, a former CEO of the Eastman Kodak Company itself, once said, with admirable succinctness: “George Eastman put snapshots in wallets – Alfred Stieglitz put photographs on museum walls.”’7 Kasebier was a professional portrait photographer and admired by the pictorialists of the time, especially Alfred Stieglitz.8 The art critic Carol Armstrong states, ‘She became the first independently elected (that is, not on account of a husband) women member of the Linked Ring in 1900, and was the only female founding member of the PhotoSecession when it started up in 1902.’9 From this statement it is clear that Kasebier was hugely revered and influential, even by such visionaries as Stieglitz. But what was it about her and her work that was so masterful and distinctive? How did it challenge accepted conventions in culture and society? Did her work confront any blockages against women, and what role did femininity play? I will analyse two images Kasebier created in the early period of the twentieth century, in the midst of pictorialism, and attempt to yield informative answers from an analytical approach to her work.

fig.4. Blessed Art Thou among women. Gertrude Kasebier, 1903.

The image made by Kasebier (fig.4.) in 1899, as a negative, and then printed as a photogravure in 1903 is an archetypal example of her work and her way of thinking. Originally appearing in Stieglitz’s January 1903 journal issue Camera Work, the image depicts a Victorian domestic space where a woman in flowing white robes stands at the verge of a doorway next to a young girl wearing a dark dress and stockings. Hanging on the wall directly behind them is a framed picture of The Visitation. Kasebier’s title of the image refers to the biblical visitation when the Virgin Mary met with Saint Elizabeth when they were both pregnant. Kasebier serves a twist to the original narrative through her artistic wit and replaces the sacred child with a daughter instead of a son. The mother’s sweeping white gown relates her to the classic image of the feminine, painted by such masters as, James M. Whistler and George H. Seeley.

fig.5. Symphony in White, No. 2: The Little White Girl. James Mc Neill Whistler, 1864.

The white gown signifies ‘the power of such feminine bodilessness represented in Whistler’s “White Girls” of the 1860s and his veiled female figures of the 1870s, as a model for bourgeois order is evidenced in the host of “white girls”…’10 In Kasebier’s photograph (fig.4.) the flowing white gown of the mother is in stark contrast to the attire of the child, the short dark dress punctuated by a bold belt buckle, along with her necktie and her short masculine hair style suggests she is intended to be more vigorous and autonomous. This profound image essentially illustrates the feminine evolution, depicting a mother sending her daughter into the world with the blessings of the old feminine paradigm but possessing a shrewd independence to enable the forging of a new identity and fresh opportunity.

The representation of the mother, the female, is at odds to that of Clarence White’s female body (fig.3.) although the prints were made within a year of each other and within the same circle of artistic discipline and depiction. This highlights Kasebier’s unique vision: ‘Her imagery capitalized on the feminine as a function of motherhood – the selfless, maternal body – and a type of

bodiless women without children, a dematerialised link to the occult energies of nature. Kasebier showed the pictorialists how to stage the female figure to incorporate the new middle-class typologies of woman as an agent of social progress…’11 Kasebier made her photographs at a time when the development of modern feminism was taking shape, from 1890 to 1920. The development of this was in large part due to the entrenched ideology of a patriarchal society with regards to gender and fairness perpetuated by out-dated classical visual art and ideas. Kasebier’s photographs can be seen as a response to this; for instance, the emphasis on the child’s independence perhaps signifying the future she had in mind for women. The same token solidifies the importance of the female, the wife and the mother as a keystone of the family unit, and visualises the complex and invaluable relationship exchanges between mother and child.

These powerful yet subtle themes can be observed in another photograph by Kasebier, created as a gumbichromate print in 1903.

fig.6. Mother and Child. Gertrude Kasebier, 1903.

The image (fig.6.) depicts an infant child in a white robe sitting on the lap of an adult female figure shrouded in darkness. The piercing stare and physical poise of the infant is neither submissive nor authoritative, it is one of poetic curiosity coupled with the fact the child seems to be struggling to get away from the mother, and evokes a certain independence. This was of course at odds with the Victorian cult of domesticity, the origin of the blockages for women. The writer John Pultz comments on her photographs; that they ‘…present women in very physical ways, yet always as having procreative, maternal and nurturing bodies that are neither the subjects nor the objects of heterosexual sensuality.’12 In summary, the female pictorialist photographer Gertrude Kasebier created some of the most groundbreaking, original and distinctive work of the early twentieth century. Kasebier’s work, herself and her ideas would prove to be influential for photographic artists such as Alvin Langdon Coburn and Imogen Cunningham.

Her photographs deal with the body in ways that question or undermine the dominant ideology of the time. They represent fresh points of view external or even opposite to it, such as the empowering of the usually submissive domestic realm. This can be seen as stemming from her experience of giving birth and subsequently raising three of her children alone. The immense emotional impact this had on her informed her priorities and concerns in governing her photographic practice. Furthermore, the time she spent studying at the Pratt Institute amongst a progressive feminine culture was where she came into contact with Friedrich Froebel’s ideas, which re-energised her desire to create a maternal and feminine motif in her work. As Kasebier began practising seriously she adopted the aesthetic and spiritual code of the time, Stieglitz’s vision of photography, Picotrialism.

She truly was a master photographer and printer who shunned accepted conventions to do with subject matter and traditions in representing the human body. In utilising her gender she succeeded in exposing a tempered genteel culture thriving within a closed off domestic sphere. This was achieved through her mastery in representing the symbolic relationships between mother and child. I believe above all it was sincerity that defined her and her practice, as her friend and professional women photographer Frances Benjamin Johnston once wrote in the journal Camera Work in 1903, ‘With all the force of her wonderful personality she has struck the keynote of achievement in photographic portraiture,

and that keynote is absolute sincerity…Gifted with such a temperament…this is why her influence is extending in ever widening circles to professionals everywhere, many of whom may not even know her name.’13

References 1. ‘Pictorialism’; came into common use around 1900. The terms describe a photographic movement in fashion from 1885 following the production and introduction of the ‘dry-plate’ process. The movement was primarily concerned with art photography having to emulate the painting and drawing of the time.

2. Garner, G., Gertrude Kasebier and Helen Levitt. Art Journal, vol.51, no.4. America: College Art Association, winter 1992, pp.84.

3. Friedrich Froebel; was a German educator active around the mid to late Nineteenth Century. He is recognised in giving the Kindergarten movement its authority and strengthening its ideology through his influential teachings on the importance of catering for child development.

4. Garner, G., 1992, pp.87.

5. Pyne, K., Modernism and the Feminine Voice, O’Keeffe and the Women of the Steiglitz Circle. London: University of California Press Ltd., 2007, pp.xxix. (Introduction) 6. Clarke, G., The Photograph. New York: Oxford University Press Inc., 1997, pp.125.

7. Badger, G., The Genius of Photography, How photography has changed our lives. London: Quadrille Publishing Ltd, 2007, pp.42.

8. Early on, that is. Steiglitz’s first issue of his magazine ‘Camera Work’ (1903) featured Kasebier and was entirely devoted to her. Her work being reproduced twelve times in the run of the journal, more than any other woman photographer. Following this she was invited by Steiglitz to join the ‘Photo-Secession’. Kasebier went her separate way in 1912, and in 1916 she helped to found the rival ‘Pictorial Photographers of America’.

9. Armstrong, C., From Clementia to Kasebier: The Photographic Attainment of the Lady Amateur. October Magazine, no.91.

Massachusetts: The MIT Press., winter 2000, pp.16.

10. Pyne, K., 2007, pp.10.

11. Pyne, K., 2007, pp.16.

12. Pultz, J., Photography and the Body. London: The Orion Publishing Group, 1995, pp.46.

13. Philippi, S. (ed), Alfred Stieglitz, Camera Work, The Complete Illustrations 1903-1917. Köln: Taschen, 1997, pp.106.

Chapter Two

The Media Image.

“Modern man strolls through the garden of history as if in a theatrical store, trying on one mask after another.”1 The American artist Cindy Sherman has been hailed as one of the most important living artists of the twentieth century. Like Gertrude Kasebier before her, the artist and her photographic work challenged cultural assumptions in relation to the representation of the body, specifically that of women. This chapter; The Media Image will focus on the mid-to-late twentieth century cultural milieu, and through that period explore and analyse the early work of Cindy Sherman in an attempt to unpick and expose what factors influenced her interpretation in representing the body. Also, how it confronted certain blockages to women, notably the mass-media construct or stereotyped image of women observed and consumed through glossy magazines and cinema.

Sherman was born in 1954 in New Jersey, America. She graduated from college in 1978 and set about making her landmark ‘Untitled Film Stills’ series. These humble black and white, grainy, ten by eight prints would elevate Sherman to the position of master artist within a handful of years. They retain their invaluable currency because of how and when they were created; to put it into context the time in which they were made witnessed an upsurge in feminist thinking and also observed the dawn of postmodernism and the impact this had on art practice. The writer Gerry Badger comments on Sherman’s work as, ‘An expression of this new way of thinking about art – as a system of signs whose meaning is determined by reference to other signs – Sherman’s photographs challenge our perception of, and interaction with, the images that surround us as we live our lives.’2 Sherman’s Film Stills series 1977-1980, the subject of this analytical investigation, have been subject to an abundance of critical debates and subsequent publications, and this indeed highlights the fact that the series is one of, if not the, most original, provocative and influential achievements in recent art. The series see Sherman don a whole host of guises, wigs and costumes to act out a range of different roles, all of which represent women through Sherman’s use of herself as the sole subject in her work. The scenarios see her act out mini-psychodramas involving feminine stereotypes evoking the

B-movie films of the 1950s that presented women as weak, naïve, and vulnerable. The images are not meant to be technical or beautiful but concentrate on eliciting significance. These staged and imagined situations are created for the viewer, with Sherman utilising herself as model to great generic effect so that each individual observer may invent their own notion of how things might play out, ultimately projecting themselves into the images and more specifically the protagonist; that is where their timeless suggestive power lies.

In line with postmodern practice, Sherman’s generic approach to her presentation is fundamental, as the viewer searches through their own library of images in their mind to fill in the blanks. The curator Francesco Bonami proclaims effectively in pointing out that, ‘…Sherman applies the concept of “appropriation” to the viewers of her work. She encourages their desire to identify themselves with what they see…For this reason the artist avoids labelling her works...because a title would override the viewers own free associations.’3 The image made by Sherman in 1975 (fig.7.) and called ‘A Play of Selves, Act 1, Scene 10’ predates the Untitled Film Stills series.

Though the image illustrates how the artist uses herself as a generic model to great effect, enlisting multiple roles collaged into a single space.

fig.7. A Play of Selves, Act 1 Scene 10. Cindy Sherman, 1975.

The cultural and photographic milieu manifesting itself during and around the late mid-twentieth century was one that yielded a highly charged electric atmosphere, one that would have a resounding impact on how creative practitioners worked. The firm social and political harmony of 1950’s America began to erode away through the sixties and through the Vietnam War era into the seventies and eighties. The recently formed youth culture of the sixties retained its appetite and desire for social change and equality.

In 1969, 250,0004 demonstrators marched in Washington to oppose the Vietnam War. In 1970 the US Feminists parade was observed, celebrating fifty years of women’s voting rights. The feminist movement of the 1970s was crucial in formulating a platform for women of all backgrounds to speak out against perceived injustice.

This became a tool of significance in many artists work, from Carolee Schneemann to Barbara Kruger in America, and a little later in Great Britain, Jo Spence and Terry Dennett. The cultural convergence of two factors led to the most radical, politicised and original artwork of the twentieth century. First, the dawn of the postmodern era that superseded Modernism, and second, the rise of modern Feminism.

The era of Postmodernism described by the author John Pultz, ‘…presented photographers with strategic options. One has been to continue to use the highly purified formalist language of Modernism, but to use it more self-consciously, exploring depictions of the body, for example through contemporary social, economic and political discourse. As a consequence photographers break into taboo subjects…A second postmodernist strategy is to exploit and embrace earlier styles…Postmodernists use these once-abused styles to make photography whose artifice is the first statement it makes.’5 The convergence of these two authoritative discourses, on the one hand, postmodernist ideology that challenged and critiqued representation, and on the other, Feminist thinking that clearly critiqued that of Patriarchy. The two combined lent a powerful platform for artists and photographers to ‘…begin to make work that either portrayed women as women would want to see themselves, or critiqued male views of women.’6 As outlined in the introduction to this dissertation, the art critic John Berger and writer Laura Mulvey both lent their now celebrated essays relating to the gaze. These helped form an ideological standing for modern Feminism within the context

of art making practice, and gave weight to artists who tackled and confronted these blockages. As Badger reveals, ‘One of the key tenets of postmodern cultural theory was that of the “male gaze.”’7 To illustrate this point clearly and effectively I have chosen a piece of work (fig.8.) by the American graphic designer turned artist Barbara Kruger made in 1982. Kruger uses appropriated imagery churned out by the mass media and lays evocative and provocative text over the top. Utilising graphic design mechanisms she has learnt, her confrontational images mirror that of advertising. The repeated use of personal pronouns is to establish a direct connection between the artist/image and the spectator. Kruger comments on the use of the female body to sell things in contemporary consumer culture: “your” suggests a patriarchal male, while “my” suggests the repressed other, that of the woman.

fig.8. Untitled (My Face is Your Fortune). Barbara Kruger, 1982.

Like Gertrude Kasebier before her, Kruger confronts the patriarchal regime of the time through her images depicting the female body. However, Kruger’s (fig.8.) are more sophisticated aesthetically,

and question provocatively the terms of representation in the way they are constructed and read. Note the painted fingernail to signify the feminine. Both have become quintessential images of their respective periods in history, and both artists enlisted versions of feminism and femininity in their work to attempt to challenge accepted social conventions and cultural assumptions.

Two images made by Cindy Sherman within the seminal series, Untitled Film Stills made between 1977 and 1980 are interesting within the context of this particular period in history. Produced in the midst of postmodernism and modern feminism they are able to yield informative answers from an analytical approach to her work.

In decoding specific images I will attempt to expose the factors that influenced Sherman in representing the body the way she does in her work. The first image by Sherman is called Untitled Film Still #21 (fig.9.) and was made in 1978.

fig.9. Untitled Film Still #21. Cindy Sherman, 1978.

Sherman is depicted in the image (fig.9.) as a big-city up and coming professional. Sherman dons a guise reminiscent of 1950s attire, complete with a smart wool suit, a cloche hat and blonde curls framing her innocent face. From the angle the photograph has been taken, it is clear it suggests a staged shot rather than a fleeting passive shot. More like a film still created within its own context of a

longer narrative that we know does not exist. The expression on the protagonist’s face is one of caution and anxiety, strengthening the suggestive power of the static image.

The authoritative and confrontational discourse Kruger’s image (fig.9.) stimulates, in relation to the much-theorised ‘male gaze’ is absent from Sherman’s image. Though both artists and their work are discussed within the framework of feminist thought and assumptions relating to a patriarchal society, Sherman indeed proclaims ‘…that she had never heard of the “male gaze” theory when she began making Untitled Film Stills.’8 In fact Laura Mulvey goes further in her essay, ‘Cosmetics and Abjection: Cindy Sherman 1977-87’, by stating that Sherman expresses a ‘…non-theoretical, even anti-theoretical stance.

Paradoxically, it is because there is no explicit citation of theory in the work…that theory can then come into its own.’9 With the many critical discourses involved with Sherman’s work, such as theories of representation, unpicking cultural assumptions and deconstructive post-modernism, the nature of the works positioning in and out of one discourse then into another simultaneously has led the feminist writer Jan Avgikos to argue that it is ‘…in that convergence, the feminist content of her work emerges.’10 So I would argue that it was the duel role of postmodernisms critique of representation and feminisms critique of a patriarchal society that led to Sherman’s work being at once profoundly powerful and then entrenched in complexities relating to a fixed ideological stance. And indeed, witnessed through the entire series, Sherman’s mastery of charging the psychodramas with desolation, solitude and nostalgia, expressed and observed through a woman but crucially part of everyone’s experience, the work can be enjoyed by everyone, even men. The work forms a reaction in challenging cultural conventions, exposing the blockages toward everybody, and that of the universal media-perpetuated and perpetrated stereotype.

The image entitled Untitled Film Still #6 (fig.10.) created in 1977 forms part of the influential Untitled Film Stills series and depicts Sherman as a middle-class young twenty-something girl. The scantily clad body of the women cuts the image diagonally in two, breaking the symmetry of the central shot. The subtly charged expression on the women’s face suggests anticipation and anxiety of an event just happened or about to take place.

fig.10. Untitled Film Still #6. Cindy Sherman, 1977.

Again, this image evokes enigmatic yet narratively charged moments from 1950s B-movies as witnessed in Sherman’s previous staged photograph from the series (fig.9.). Yet this image seems more in keeping with the feminist discourse outlined previously, because of the sexualised flesh exhibited and the angle from where the photograph is taken suggests a certain dominance of the view, or specifically the male gaze.

In contrast to Kruger’s images (fig.8.), Sherman employs herself and herself alone as the subject in her photographs that constitute the Untitled series. The use of the ‘self-image’ in photographic practice, essentially turning the camera on oneself, is riddled with problems such as, vanity and self-indulgence and provides a different way of reading an image in relation to representing the body. I argue that the use of herself in her images seems to avoid this, and instead becomes an extension of the performance art or body-art witnessed from the mid-seventies that became a popular and political artistic discipline, as executed by women practitioners such as Carolee Schneemann and Judy Chicago that promoted gender-critical art practice. The art historian Amelia Jones underscores this clearly,

‘Drawing on feminism as well as phenomenology…Sherman’s work participates in a particular mode of performative artistic production typical of post-1960 body-orientated practices: a mode in which the subject of making is enacted through representation rather than veiled as in the modernist project.’11 The writer and critic Arthur C. Danto echoes this point about the notion that Sherman’s work was part of a perfromative-orientated art practice, which goes some way in answering questions relating to the use of her self-image.

‘Sherman’s art belongs at the cross-point between the artistic appropriation of the working photograph as one line, and the use by performance artists, especially women, of the photograph as a document of a performance, as the other.’12 Danto goes on to comment specifically about the use of her self-image, ‘…none of Cindy Sherman’s images is of Cindy Sherman as.

They are of [T]he [G]irl, for whom Cindy Sherman posed. So the images are of Cindy Sherman in a way that is incidental and even secondary in any given work, but curiously central and essential to the work taken as a whole…They are portraits at best of an identity she shares with every women who conceives the narrative of her life in the idiom of the cheap movie.’13 On balance, the artist Cindy Sherman, America’s first postmodern bitter sweetheart created some of the most original and influential achievements in recent art. Her work tells us that, knowingly or not, we have absorbed the movie culture she invites us to examine as a powerful force in our lives. This touches a vital nerve in our culture, and with Sherman’s wizardry, she successfully exposes these powerful and artificial stereotypes maintained by the mass-media machine that crucially are not exclusive to women, but in fact involve everybody and everyone, including men.

As outlined in this chapter the period in history, that of the 1970s and 1980s was in a state of radical social revisionism and artistic flux. The convergence of the different discourses Sherman’s work inextricably becomes involved with becomes testament to the progressive and resonating power of her Untitled series.

To draw the main points in The Media Image chapter to a close I will highlight the factors that influenced Sherman’s interpretation in representing the body. The convergence of postmodernism and

feminism in Sherman’s work inevitably had an influencing effect on her practice although she does declare herself as having no theoretical stance, I believe that there was a mutual relationship between herself and the emerging discourses. Her work also plays into the hands of postmodernism’s requisites, with notions of the self, representation, identity and self-conscious critical practice. I would argue that her desire to don the many guises she has was born out of the 1970s performance art culture in America. As she clearly states herself, ‘…I was into conceptual, minimal, performance, body art, film-alternatives…I’d play with make-up for a while just to see where it took me.’14 The complex notion of feminism’s role in her work is to this day still contested on many levels, some of which I have attempted to outline. However, I would argue that her own femininity had a crucial role to play in her works critical reception in challenging cultural assumptions and contemporary issues of representation and identity. This is because she exploits the male-dominated patriarchal framework that visual culture is grounded in, but in a way that the whole media-driven visual culture comes under the spotlight as well as the coded cultural construction of identity and gender. As Jones implies, ‘…artists began to explore femininity as not only the sign of oppression but as an indication of the performativity of sexuality and gender, specifically in relation to oppositional structures…’15

References 1. Bonami, F. (ed), Cindy Sherman. Milan: Mondadori electa, 2007, pp.7.

2. Badger, G., The Genius of Photography, How photography has changed our lives. London: Quadrille Publishing Ltd, 2007, pp.164.

3. Bonami, F., 2007, pp.11.

4. Langford, M. (et al), Langford’s Basic Photography. (Eighth Edition).

Oxford: Elsevier Ltd., 2007, pp.390. (Timeline) 5. Pultz, J., Photography and the Body. London: The Orion Publishing Group, 1995, pp.143-144.

6. Badger, G., 2007, pp.165.

7. Badger, G., 2007, pp.165.

8. Badger, G., 2007, pp.166.

9. Mulvey, L., ‘Cosmetics and Abjection: Cindy Sherman 1977-87’ (1991/1996) in Burton, J., (ed). Cindy Sherman. October Files 6.

Massachusetts: MIT Press, 2006, pp.65.

10. Avgikos, J., ‘Cindy Sherman: Burning Down the House’, (1983).

Artforum, Jan 1993, in Wells, L., (ed). The Photography Reader.

Oxon: Routledge, 2009, pp.338.

11. Amelia, J., ‘Tracing the Subject with Cindy Sherman’, in Cruz, A., (et al). Cindy Sherman: Retrospective. London: Thames and Hudson Ltd., 1997, pp.33.

12. Danto, A, C., ‘Photography and Performance: Cindy Sherman’s Stills’, in, Sherman, C., Cindy Sherman: Untitled Film Stills. Munich: Schirmer/Mosel Verlag GmbH., 1998, pp.11.

13. Danto, A, C., 1998, pp.10.

14. Sherman, C., ‘The Making of Untitled’, in Sherman, C., Galassi, P., Cindy Sherman: The Complete Untitled Film Stills. New York: The Museum of Modern Art, 2003, pp.5/6.

15. Amelia, J., 1997, pp.38.

Conclusion.

The twentieth century witnessed mass change, from early modernism right through to postmodernism. Change occurred in every pocket of society; technologically, socially, economically, politically, institutionally and visually. Before, between and after the World Wars the human body was reconfigured and re-interpreted in all its wonderful and mysterious forms within the visual arts. As the art professor John Pultz declares ‘…that the representation of the body in the visual arts is central to society’s construction not only of norms of sexual behaviour but of power relationships in general.’1 In terms of art photography the body became a canvas for highly charged debates centring around issues to do with society, politics, representation, identity and class.

The two artists I have isolated in this dissertation within the two chapters, practised photography at opposite ends of the chronological spectrum of the twentieth century. Gertrude Kasebier outlined in The Personal Image practised at the height of her career from 1880 to 1910 within the paradigm of Pictorialism. Whereas Cindy Sherman, highlighted in the second chapter The Media Image, practised photography seriously from the 1970s to the present, within the paradigm of postmodernism. The number of years in-between the two artists milieu of photographic practice will help highlight the evolution and reconfiguration of ideology and technique in representing the body, and also reveal any differences and similarities between the two artists that govern their priorities and concerns in the context of that particular time in history.

Chapter one; The Personal Image, explored Gertrude Kasebier’s work within the context of Pictorialism and early-twentiethcentury society. Representations of women had been intertwined with power relationships and social control and could be exposed by applying feminist ideology retrospectively to specific images made by the artist. Also revealing the fabrication of patriarchal structures through ostensibly normal depictions of women. This then gave clearer insight into what factors governed Kasebier’s practice, such as motherhood, femininity, domesticity, independence, sincerity and empathy all shot through the canon of pictorialist ideology and application.

Chapter Two; The Media Image, considered the work of Cindy Sherman within the context of postmodernism and late twentieth century Euro-American society. During this period many artists

opted to apply their art practice to more self-consciously problematic subjects, dealing with representation, self-image, identity, the mass media, race , gender and class. The human body was socially and politically connected and responded to and unpicked cultural assumptions and conventions. Through analysing specific images produced by the artist within the framework of the new emerging discourses of the time revealed the factors that governed her priorities and concerns when representing the body. For example, the convergence of postmodernism and feminism, the role of femininity, mass-media, pop-culture and feminist performance art. The formation of these factors into the artists practice exposed the mass media’s cultural construct of gender and identity entrenched in social consciousness.

An analysis of the theoretical complexities that are outlined in the body of this dissertation, allows the similarities between the two female photographic artists begin to emerge. Both enlist their gender as a distinctive tool to challenge the male-dominated patriarchal society of the time, directly or not, they were both extremely effective in exposing the normally invisible, or more specifically in Sherman’s case reframing the context of the all too visible to demonstrate something new and significant. Both of the artists created work of originality and influence that undermined the conventions and assumptions of the time. For example, the empowering of the maternal women and the domestic sphere, or subverting mass media mechanisms to expose its flaws and inequalities and to reveal how external forces condition us. The Roland Barthes expression, punctum, illustrates that profound feeling when observing particular images, whether it’s the independent child confrontationally gazing outwards in Kasebier’s images or the strangely familiar poses and guises Sherman dons in her work. As Barthes proclaims, ‘A photograph’s punctum is that accident which pricks me (but also bruises me, is poignant to me).2 In Summary, many factors inevitably influence a photographer’s practice, they can be; cultural, historical, social, political, ideological, refer to process and technique, relate to class, race and gender to name just a few, and when the body becomes the subject of the photographic artwork it becomes inextricably connected to the sociopolitical paradigm. Because of this reason the body becomes an

important platform to express meaningful and indispensable issues of self, society and culture within photographic practice, and has been used so throughout the twentieth century and into the twenty-first century. William A. Ewing the director of one of the world’s foremost photography museums, the Musée de l’Elysée in Lausanne, says it masterfully in talking of the relationship photographers have with the subject of the body; ‘Today the body is of central concern to science and is a burning issue of art. It is not fashion that drives artists to reflect on the subject, however, but necessity, as the natural body is buffeted increasingly by technological tremors and emotional shocks. Art helps us discern what is happening and enables us to make considered choices about our future. Photography has proved to be an indispensable and versatile tool…’3

References 1. Pultz, J., Photography and the Body. London: The Orion Publishing Group, 1995, pp.7.

2. Barthes, R., Camera Lucida (new edition). London: Vintage, 2000, pp.27.

3. Ewing, A, W. (ed), The Century of the Body, 100 Photoworks 1900 – 2000. New York: Thames and Hudson, 2000, pp.11.

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Video and Film • The Genius of Photography, DVD series. BBC, 2009. 300 minutes.

Television Programmes • Vile Bodies, Channel 4 and Blast! Films series. 23 March 1998. 60 (x3) minutes.