Martine Gutierrez & Cindy Sherman
Martine Gutierrez is an American artist born 1989. She has become a published musician and producer, featured by several fashion houses including Dior and Acne. As a photographer, Martin explores the relationship between gender, identity, and perception, redefining and reshaping boundaries through the staged photograph.
Cindy Sherman was born in 1954 in New Jersey. She is an American photographer. She is best known for her imagery, particularly her “disguised” self-portraits, which generally criticize social role-playing and sexual stereotypes. Sherman presents viewers with an ambiguous portrayal of women as sex objects. Sherman stated that the series was “about the fakeness of role-playing as well as contempt for the domineering ‘male’ audience who would mistakenly read the images as sexy.” She is her own model in her photographs, using wigs and costumes that evoke images from the realms of advertising, television, film, and fashion and that, in turn, challenge the cultural stereotypes supported by these media.
Feminism?
Sherman and Gutierrez both participate in making image which reflects femenism.In 2014 Martine Gutierrez created a series called Girlfriends. Girlfriends is a series of black-and-white images in which Martine Gutierrez poses with a single mannequin, They were composed and taken in upstate New York at Gutierrez’s grandmother’s cabin. It is evident that Gutierrez’s use of mannequins is as girlfriends, as in many of her works of art. But Gutierrez also uses the mannequin to soulign the mannequin’s idealistic appearance. Especially in its artificiality, it is the “perfect” body, comparing with the reality of the imperfect human body. Despite the hundreds of portraits toying with female stereotypes that Cindy Sherman has produced throughout her career, Sherman’s big artistic break came with the “Untitled Film Stills.” To make the series, the artist served as both photographer and subject, transforming herself with makeup, wigs, and elaborate costumes into figures that recalled the movie stars of an earlier generation. With the series Serman explains how ridiculous it is that women in movies are always young, thin and pretty.
Image analysis
In the image of Gutierrez there are two female characters, the two characters look identical but when you look closely you can realize that one of them is actually a mannequin. The outdoor environment makes me think of a scene in Forest Gump that happens in the southwestern United States. But the sitting seems to be a Mise in Scene, it is clear that this is not reality or the artist is using a background. We can say by the fact that you can see in the background at the top of the sky some undulating parts. Including the mannequin and using a background are the choices the artist made. She make us wonder who or what in this image are real. What are we defining real? Cindy Sherman is also in what we might consider the American Southwest. She’s sitting in a tree, which would be an unusual thing to discover out there, that makes it seem like it could also be taken in a studio. Like in Martine Gutierrez image we wonder what’s real or is the setting real? But this time Cindy Serman chose to just use her as a model in her image.
