Suzy Lake

“Although she has not overtly addressed feminist issues, the politics of feminism is an undercurrent in all her major photographic works to date. The attention to power relations that feminism implies may be seen in Lake’s work as symbolic of a personal struggle, and her artwork is evident

of her progress”.

Lake’s work continues to use references to the body as a means to investigate notions of beauty in the context of youth and consumer culture.

https://vimeo.com/30434842

Suzy Lake: Self Image Performance.

‘Identity Crisis’ Alexis Hunter

http://www.frieze.com/issue/review/alexis_hunter/

‘Identity Crisis’ comprises six images of the artist, each taken by a different person in her life over the course of two weeks in 1974. Hunter asked them to take a photograph of how they saw her. In one image she wears a hard hat and looks defiantly out at the viewer. In another she is softly lit, fully made up with a pearl necklace and open shirt, the picture of alluring femininity. In yet another her hair is shaggy and she looks down, suggesting a vulnerability and lack of self-confidence.

Martha Rosler's Semiotics of the Kitchen - 1975

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3zSA9Rm2PZA

From A to Z, Rosler "shows and tells" the ingredients of the housewife's day, giving us a tour that names and mimics the ordinary with movements more samurai than suburban. Rosler's slashing gesture as she forms the letters of the alphabet in the air with a knife and fork, is a rebel gesture, punching through the "system of harnessed subjectivity" from the inside out. 

"I was concerned with something like the notion of Ôlanguage speaking the subject,' and with the transformation of the woman herself into a sign in a system of signs that represent a system of food production, a system of harnessed subjectivity." 
—Martha Rosler

Duane Michals

http://duanemichals.tumblr.com/
http://www.artnews.com/2013/07/29/duane-michals-fighting-against-photography/

In the 1960s, Duane Michals worked as a freelance fashion photographer and portraitist, while his artistic work began to address literary and philosophical ideas about death, gender and sexuality. Working with staged scenes, he experimented with multiple exposures, sequences and combining text and drawings with his images.

Woman: The Feminist Avant Garde from the 1970s

http://www.theguardian.com/artanddesign/2013/jun/14/photoespana-seventies-feminist-avant-garde

Woman: The Feminist Avant Garde from the 1970s.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HUJlYsvdV7I
Cindy Sherman Doll Clothes (1975)

http://www.theguardian.com/artanddesign/gallery/2010/nov/21/francesca-woodman-photography#/?picture=368861099&index=9
Francesca Woodman.

http://www.flickr.com/photos/artstu/

This is a recent photo shoot of mine, relating to my project. 

It takes a lot of imagination to be a good photographer. You need less imagination to be a painter because you can invent things. But in photography everything is so ordinary; it takes a lot of looking before you learn to see the extraordinary.
David Bailey 

David Bailey revolutionised fashion and portrait photography in the 1960s with his spare, graphic aesthetic and irreverent approach.  

Best known for his iconic photographs of artists, musicians and actors of the 1960s and 1970s, including Andy Warhol, the Rolling Stones and Catherine Deneuve, Bailey has gone on to publish work ranging from gritty London streetscapes to intimate photographs of his wife and family.

I am drawn to David Baileys beautiful photographs. Even though they don't directly relate to my work, but these black and white images are exactly what I am looking to create. They're timeless. These photographs draw you in, you feel like you want to be these people. You admire them and it doesn't particularly matter what they have done. You want to be one of these beautiful people. 

http://www.independent.co.uk/news/people/profiles/i-was-young-and-foolish-the-truth-behind-david-baileys-legendary-way-with-women-1909500.html

The Pin-up girl culture became very popular during the early 20th century and continued well into the 80s and even late 90s. Many pin-ups were photographs of celebrities who were considered sex symbols. Other pin-ups were artwork, often depicting idealized versions of what some thought a particularly beautiful or attractive woman should look like. The genre also gave rise to several well-known artists specializing in the field, one of whom was the American painter and illustrator Gil Elvgren.

He takes photos of these pin ups and he paints them into these perfect images of beauty.
Fun, beautiful Woman that we would all love to be. He wipes out all their imperfections, makes them skinnier, makes them look more fertile. I originally started looking at Gil Elvgren for his glamour paintings, but I find the photographs behind his work even more beautiful. Real woman having fun, they're exquisite and they're powerful. 

Cindy Sherman wants to be a Feminist void of bullshit. Her film stills explore; vulnerability, power and femininity through the re-enactment of iconic film images. The ambivalent attitude she has towards the representation of women in popular culture manifests in her work as an objective image. I suggest this work is empty of narrative through lack of context which enables the viewer to create their own verisimilitude on a personal basis. I want to apply concepts of context back to the medium (of film) and use stereotypes and accepted hegemonies to discuss how contemporary women are affected by these representations.

http://darksilenceinsuburbia.tumblr.com/post/64870737934/republicx-black-and-white-surrealism-by-noe

Noé Sendas is a Berlin-based Belgian artist whose work is weirdly unsettling. Rooted in cinematic and literary references, his images depict ghostly, unnerving figures whose heads or limbs appear to be invisible, or which have seemingly blended into furniture or walls. Sendas works with film, sculpture and photography; his his most arresting work, examples of which are shown here, frequently uses film stills from Hollywood's golden age which are manipulated to remove faces and personality, turning the actor and actress's bodies into enigmatic, lifeless objects, often sculptural in their stillness. Its a fascinating body of work, that follows themes of abstracting and partly erasing the human body through photography explored by those ever-present titans, John Baldessari and Guy Bourdin, and the less well-known but equally brilliant American sculptor Robert Gober.  Its also something of a counterpoint to the contemporary subversion of John Stezaker's collaged appropriation of Hollywood head shots, whose results are very different but who delights in defacing once-great screen idols.

"Untitled Film Stills is a series of sixty-nine black-and-white photographs made between 1977 and 1980. In them Sherman appears as fictitious characters in scenarios resembling moments in a film. She used vintage clothing, wigs and makeup to create a range of female personae which she then photographed in apparently solitary, unguarded moments of reflection, undress, or in conversation with somebody off-set and outside of the frame. "

I have been focusing on Cindy Sherman for my project, I find her multiple personalities within her work fascinating. With the use of make-up and different wigs and clothes, she can change from a Hitchcock girl, a housewife to a woman victim to abuse. Its beautiful to see. Creating these nostalgic grainy images of a past time. Film stills full of stories, although she doesn't give us any help to formulate the tale behind them, they are left for us to articulate.

• "I didn't want to make 'high' art, I had no interest in using paint, I wanted to find something that anyone could relate to without knowing about contemporary art. I wasn't thinking in terms of precious prints or archival quality; I didn't want the work to seem like a commodity." Cindy Sherman.

Her work focuses on identity, gender, the "vulnerability" of woman, and of course  in comparison to this the secret power of woman. It is feminist work at its finest, it is taking the stereotypes of woman with film noir and spinning them on their head, saying, if this is what you want, here you go!. Stuart and Elisabeth Even addresses the importance of silent film on woman, they refer to early movies as manuals of desire wishes and dreams. Causing a gap between mothers who had been raised according to their traditions and daughters who wanted to be apart of the new culture.

 "The work is what it is and hopefully it’s seen as feminist work, or feminist-advised work, but I'm not going to go around espousing theoretical bullshit about feminist stuff." 

Frieze

vfff - slideshow

    Something a little different. 

"The camera doesn't rape or even possess though it my presume, intrude, trespass, distort, exploit, and at the farthest reach of a metaphor, assassinate".
Page 13. Diane Arbus. On Photography. Susan Sontag. Allen Lane.

I always thought photography as a naughty thing, that was one of my Favorited things about it... and when I first did it I felt very perverse".
Diane Arbus. Page 12/13. On Photography. Susan Sontag. Allen Lane.

I have decided that photography and video art will indeed be my main form of focus, creating various pieces of art depicting different typical stages of a woman's life. The subjection of woman, whilst looking into feminist theory. I have been watching movies that are typical of displaying woman in a submissive, well behaved, sophisticated, typical 'perfect woman, perfect housewife' demur. Hitchcock explained his preference for a certain kind of actress whose sex appeal is "indirect": "You know why I favor sophisticated blondes in my films? We're after the drawing-room type, the real ladies, who become whores once they're in the bedroom." In Vertigo James Stewart forces a woman to dye her hair blonde. One of Hitchcock's earliest films, The Lodger (1927), features a serial killer who stalks blonde women. 

http://classicfilm.about.com/od/alfredhitchcock/tp/7-Hitchcock-Leading-Ladies.htm

In comparison to this I have been looking into films that are trying to break away from this stereotype; Feminism style movies such as 'Thelma and Louise', or 'Pretty Woman'. Films with the essence of the never-ending fight for equality. "Thelma and Louise sharply contrasts the other road films we have viewed in which men are telling the story and women are visual stimuli, or sexual objects the men merely meet along the way. I think the term feminism describes the Utopian view of the equality between men and women in terms of what both genders are able/expected to do, in terms of personal characteristics, actions, and lifestyles." THELMA AND LOUISE: A FEMINIST FILM CRITIQUE.


http://www.sparksummit.com/2011/09/23/thelma-and-louise-two-decades-of-feminist-action/
http://www.nytimes.com/2011/04/24/magazine/mag-24Riff-t.html?pagewanted=all&_r=0

So through looking into these types of films I would like to recreate these scenes of these woman through photography and film. 

 

Hitchcock Blonde

I'm a Hitchcock blonde.

This picture was inspired by the many Hitchcock films that I have been watching this week. Hitchcock always shows his woman as unattainable beautiful blondes, sassy, powerful confident and free. "A cool actress with an icy fire". I find the relationships between Hitchcock and his blondes terribly interesting, it seems that he wants this fire that they obtain, but in doing this he extinguishes it. 

He strove to destroy their power, he wanted to torture, belittle, punish these girls until they were bent in submission. In the process he trivialized his wife, making her seem small in comparison to these great unreachable woman, while she put him in the limelight.  

Janet Leigh became a blonde sex object for the director. In the notorious shower scene in Psycho, the blade of the knife was employed to convey the impression of violent rape and sexual invasion.


"The conclusions that we reach are that blondes, rather than having more fun, are likely to be neurotic and threatened. Sadly, their sexual allure is likely to be both their making and, ultimately, their destruction. The reason for this is that it is only a matter of time before each of them meets their own dirty old man, whether professor or film producer."

I want to give the power back to the woman within my photos. To give them strength regardless of beauty or creed. Faceless but dominant. I will continue playing with the Blonde ideal. 

The Guerrilla Girls at the Feminist Future Symposium, MoMA

To undermine the idea of a mainstream narrative in modern art.

"The art world sucks".
"Everyone thinks the art world is getting better in its treatment to woman".
"Less then 3% of the artists in the modern arts section are woman, but 83% of the nudes are female."
"According to MOMA, no woman artists are good enough to create Still life."

"In teaching us a new visual code, photographs alter and enlarge our notions of what is worth looking at and what we have a right to observe, They are a grammar and, even more importantly, an ethics of seeing."

Susan Sontag. On Photography.

NEEDS MORE WRITING SAM

Here is an edited version of one of the images that I had created on an earlier date. In this picture only the torso is visible, giving an almost sexualised feel. I wanted to keep it black and white so that I didn't have to over edit and loose the raw feel of the images.

Eleanor Antin - From the Archives of Modern Art - West Coast Video Art -...

These are a few unedited photographs. I wanted them to be as raw as possible. To show a glimpse so that the rest was ready to unravel.  

Art Marina Abramović Rhythm 0

A performance piece by Marina Abramović to test how far people will go if given that much domination over another person. 

"That was the heaviest piece I ever did because I wasn’t in control. The audience was in control."

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