What: My friends wore feminine clothing and I took pictures of around my garden e.g Them around my pond, on my bench, with some flowers and on my swing.
How: Using time priority on the camera.
Why: To respond to the theme of femininity
Photoshoot 2
Where: Jersey, in my garage
When: mid day
What: I took pictures of my brother and his friend lifting weights and working out in my shed.
How: Using time priority on the camera and experimenting with the flash.
Born October 25, 1894, Lucy Renee Mathilde Schwob was a French surrealist photographer who explored gender identity and expression through their work. After attending the University of Paris, Sorbonne, she started creating self portraits in 1912 when she was 18 years old. In the early 1920s, she switched to the gender neutral name Claude Cahun after previously changing their name three times. She moved to Jersey in the late 1930s where her and her step-sister/lover disguised as non-Jews while producing anti-Nazi propaganda. Her work was lost and forgotten after World War two but we rediscovered and brought to popularity in the 1990s.
“Under this mask, another mask, I will never be finished removing all these faces.”
– Claude Cahun
She cut her hair very short around 1915 and started taking photos of herself on a neutral background dressed either as a sailor, a sportsman, or in men’s suit, this was the start of her photography of her self identity. Claude Cahun loved repeated patterns and often used doubling and reflection to question and explore gender or identity. She also loved self portraits and being able to show off her different personalities and identities through her photography.
“You could call her transgressive or you could call her a cross dressing Man Ray with surrealist tendencies.”
I wanted to attempt to showcase one of my current personal struggles involving my health in this shoot and contrast it with how I was beforehand. To achieve this, I’d bought a costume from a party shop that looked similar to a hospital gown and borrowed a friend’s helmet.
I took these images of myself in the studio, using different camera settings to achieve different effects, such as the long exposures that I shot. The lighting was set up so that it would create harsher shadows on the left-hand side of the image, and I think it ended up looking better in the photographs where I was wearing the jacket and helmet, which was a shame as I was trying to recreate the harsh lighting that hospitals often have.
These are my final shots for this shoot. I plan to use maybe two or three for the mock exam, the images of me in the hospital gown in particular – as that was the purpose of this shoot. I might do a smaller reshoot in my own time to create a matching photograph when it comes to the angle and pose I’m stood in, so I can combine the two images either digitally or after printing to emphasise the effect that I want from this.
