Using the mirror in the studio, I made images inspired by one of Claude Cahun’s images, “Untitled”. I made around 50 images.
Here are some of my favourite images:
I especially love this image as it hides my identity, not shows it.
I would probably say that I relate this shoot to Androgyny.
Femininity:
Masculinity:
Androgyny:
Yasumasa Morimura
Yasumasa Morimura, born in 1951 in Osaka, is a Japanese artist whose work deals with issues of cultural and sexual appropriation. Morimura studied art at Kyoto City University of Arts and in 1985 made his first avant-garde self-portrait based on an iconic portrait of Vincent Van Gogh. Since then, Morimura has taken iconic images from pop culture, the media, and art history and deconstructed them using costumes, makeup, props, and digital manipulation to make provocative self-portraits.
His works exude playfulness and attest to the artist’s self-described role as an entertainer who wants to “make art that is fun.” His work often consists of inserting his face and body into portraits of artists and celebrities from history. Similar to American photographer Cindy Sherman, Morimura uses extensive props and digital manipulation to create his images, resulting in often-uncanny recreations of iconic works. “Taking photographs is generally an act of ‘looking at the object, whereas ‘being seen’ or ‘showing’ is what is of most interest to one who does a self-portrait,” he has explained. “Self-portraits deny not only photography itself, but the 20th century as an era as well.” Simultaneously reverent and satirical, his self-portraits manage to skewer traditional notions of beauty while revealing a deep appreciation for the art he appropriates.
Some of his more well-known pieces:
I would say this is my favourite image by him. I love the stylisation of the images, from the way his hands are placed to the lighting slowly fading as you go further down on his face. I picked this artist because his work really breaks down gender ideals, that men can’t wear makeup and supposedly “feminine” clothing, this could be fit into androgyny, fitting the theme of my project, as he dresses up as both females and males for his work.
Claude Cahun, born Lucy Renee Mathilde Schwob, was a surrealist, photographer, sculptor and activist. She is best known for her gender fluidity in art and her anti-Nazi resistance. She was from Nantes and was born into a provincial Jewish family. From an early age, Cahun struggled with her gender identity and in the early 1920s, she adopted the first name Claude because it could be a man or a woman.
Cahun combined several elements of surrealism, including reflections and doubling. A common theme in her work was the subversion of society’s expectations of women. Even in photographs where Cahun appears more traditionally feminine, she adds elements such as cropped hair to defy expectations of beauty.
One of my favourite images of Cahun’s is “Self Portrait of a Young Girl”. It depicts her lying in bed, looking quite sickly, hair spread out around her, reminiscent of Medusa’s. Most observers note that the tone and appearance are not appealing, many depictions of women on a bed in fine art are eroticized and Cahun’s point of view is a stark contrast to this. Cahun herself has said that the image reflects her mental health struggles after her mother fell ill and had to be committed to a mental hospital.
Cahun was friends with many Surrealist artists and writers and André Breton once called her “one of the most curious spirits of our time.” While many male Surrealists depicted women as objects of male desire, Cahun staged images of herself that challenge the idea of the politics of gender. Cahun was championing the idea of gender fluidity way before the hashtags of today. She was exploring her identity, not defining it.
In 2017, Gillian Wearing opened an exhibition in the Nation Portrait Gallery, this showed her recreating multiple of Cahun’s images using makeup and prosthetics, for example, her most famous recreation is of Cahun’s image “I am in training, don’t kiss me”. During this exhibition, Wearing often referenced what Cahun famously said “Under this mask, another mask. I will never finish removing all these faces.,” this reference is very much shown in the image “Me as Cahun holding a mask of my face” where she is recreating the image made by Cahun I have previously mentioned however with her own twist to it in which she is dressed as Cahun in the image, but she is holding a mask of her own face.
The google definition of these words :
Masculinity – qualities or attributes regarded as characteristic of men or boys.
Femininity – qualities or attributes regarded as characteristic of women or girls.
Masculinities and femininities refer to the social roles, behaviours, and meanings prescribed for men and women in any society at any time. Such normative gender ideologies must be distinguished from biological ‘sex,’ and must be understood to be plural as there is no single definition for all men and all women. Masculinities and femininities are structured and expressed through other axes of identity such as class, race, ethnicity, age, and sexuality.
Masculinity
Masculinity is usually associated with being a “real man”; attributes like being stoic and unemotional, being physically strong, not showing weakness (quite often through emotion). However, it is said that following these traditional attributes of “being a man” can be harmful. Men are less likely to search for the help of a mental health specialist than women because of the idea that “masculine men” cannot show emotion.
However, there’s a growing population of men who are beginning to reject the traditional ideas of masculinity and redefining what it means to be a man.
Femininity
‘Femininity’ is a familiar term. Conversations about being feminine are common in everyday life and many people use the word ‘feminine’ to describe themselves and others. They may equate femininity with being a woman who embodies characteristics like being nurturing, sensitive, demure, or sweet. But femininity cannot be understood as a fixed set of essential traits that characterize all women.
As a scholarly concept, femininity can carry diverse meanings with numerous interpretations. Within the context of heterosexual relationships, performances of femininity can employ different scripts. These scripts act as guidelines for individual behaviour and social interaction. They are learned at an early age and reinforced throughout the life course. When examined as a whole, individual expressions of femininity reveal distinct patterns. These themes become reinforced throughout different social institutions such as media, education, religion, sports, and the workforce.
Identity Politics
IDENTITY POLITICS is a term that describes a political approach wherein people of a particular religion, race, social background, class or other identifying factor form exclusive socio-political alliances, moving away from broad-based, coalitional politics to support and follow political movements that share a particular identifying quality with them. Its aim is to support and centre certain groups’ concerns, agendas, and projects, in accordance with specific social and political changes.
The term was first used by the Combahee River Collective, a Black feminist lesbian socialist organization active in Boston from 1974 to 1980, in 1977. It was used all over by the early 1980s, and in the ensuing decades has been employed in various cases with radically different connotations depending upon the term’s context. It has gained currency with the emergence of social activism, manifesting in various dialogues within the feminist, American civil rights, and LGBT movements, disabled groups, as well as multiple nationalist and postcolonial organizations, for example, the Black Lives Matter movement.
Culture Wars
CULTURE WARS are cultural conflicts between social groups and the struggle for dominance of their values, beliefs, and practices. It commonly refers to topics on which there is general societal disagreement and polarization in societal values are seen. The term is commonly used to describe contemporary politics in Western democracies with issues such as homosexuality, transgender rights, pornography, multiculturalism, racial viewpoints, abortion and other cultural conflicts based on values, morality, and lifestyle being described as the major political cleavage.
Michelle LeBaron describes different cultures as “underground rivers that run through our lives and relationships, giving us messages that shape our perceptions, attributions, judgments, and ideas of self and other.” She has stated that cultural messages “shape our understandings.” Due to the huge impact that culture has on us, LeBaron finds it important to explain the “complications of conflict:”
First, “culture is multi-layered,” meaning that “what you see on the surface may mask differences below the surface.”
Second, “culture is constantly in flux,” meaning that “cultural groups adapt in dynamic and sometimes unpredictable ways.”
Third, “culture is elastic,” meaning that one member of a cultural group may not participate in the norms of the culture.
Lastly, “culture is largely below the surface,” meaning that it isn’t easy to reach the deeper levels of culture and its meanings,
Main Source : Cultural Conflict Wikipedia
Google definition of Identity:
The fact of being who or what a person or thing is or a close similarity or affinity.
Identity within photography:
The relationship between photography and social identity is as old as the invention of the camera, despite the fact that its earliest developers thought that their newfangled device was best suited for other purposes.
From our perspective, it’s easy to see why the camera was embraced by so many people, who thought of it as a means of self-representation, despite what its inventors proclaimed. Previously, those who could afford to have images made of themselves were almost invariably of the upper-middle and ruling classes. They had the income and leisure to sit for the portrait painter. But suddenly, with the camera, the power of such imagery came within reach of ordinary folk, which helped them express their identity through the images they created of themselves or even other people.
Of course, these portraits and self-portraits had their share of fiction. Consider a picture of a Chinese migrant worker, who in the 1870s had made his way across the Pacific Ocean to California, taken a train across the American continent, and found temporary work as a shoemaker in a factory. One would never guess his lowly status as a migrant factory worker in the photograph; we might instead be tempted to regard him as something else, a man of taste and leisure, for instance, accessorized in the latest dapper fashion and proud to hold the latest books in English. As the photograph tells us, “identity” was quickly recognized as something that could be manufactured in front of the camera as easily as it might be discovered by it.
The constructed nature of identities is facilitated by photography. In very sophisticated ways, how identities are made in today’s globalized, interconnected, intensely visual world is often explored by photographers. In some cases, the ambitions that urged photography’s earliest sitters to take to the lens continue to inform these photographers’ practices.
Double or multiple exposures are an illusion created by layering images (or portions of images) over the top of each other. This can be achieved in the camera settings, or on Adobe Photoshop by creating layers and then using blending options and opacity control. Artist have used these techniques to explore Surrealist Ideas and evoke dream-like imagery, or imagery that explores time / time lapse.
Some artist examples:
Some of my examples:
Made in camera:
Made in photoshop:
Using different types of lighting and gels, we did some headshots inspired by Ole Christiansen, a Danish photographer.
Some of our images:
