I plan to display my final images in this way, with the two big images as A3, the top black and white image and the far left image as A4 and the two right images as A5. I also plan to try do a window mount with another final image.
I plan to board up these images from my studio portrait shoot as well. I have printed them as A4 and I plan to display them on a horizontal black board next to each other.
Justine Kurland inspired photoshoot
My selected images:
I chose this image as one of my final images as I like the composition of it. This image wasn’t staged but we are positioned well, in line, naturally.
These images were staged, we thought the tree would work well as the centre of interest in this image, which it does, the tree is the first thing the viewer would see when looking at this image, fitting with our nature, countryside theme. I’m happy with this image as the outcome came out exactly what we planned and aimed for, using Justine Kurland as inspiration.
I edited these images to appear brighter and exaggerated the colours by changing the highlights, increasing the saturation and decreasing the exposure. I also tempered with the texture of the images by using the sharpening tool (shown below).
I increased the haze, decreased the highlights and made it slightly over exposed, to give the effect that it was taken on a film camera. I like this effect, i think it reflects the theme of stereotypical femininity.
I decided to make this image black and white as if feel it makes the image stronger. There’s a lot of clutter and distractions in the image like the plants, tree and footpath; the black and white calms down the image and emphasises the focal point of the three girls. Also, the highlights of the image become more obvious ( for example, the white t-shirts) with the contrast of the shadows in the background of the image.
These images were half staged. I have chosen them as part of my final images as I really like the layout of them. The brick wall creates a strong background, it also demonstrates humanity taking over nature and the nature reclaiming its home. The green vines across the wall juxtapose the idea of us three girls in the foreground of the images. I like the perspective of these images, and how the fence of the bridge lead into the corners of the image.
During the process of taking these photos, we had Sian Daveys photoshoot of “Martha” in mind. Our photoshoot, these images in particular, reflect Daveys’ work as she photographs her daughter doing everyday things, especially in country side settings, our photoshoot is like this.
These images work well with the bridge being the centre of interest, I like the contrast of the different shades of green in the background against the beige coloured bridge. Me and anna are the focal point.
Basing our photoshoot off of Justine Kurland’s work, we plan to take photos in fields, cliff paths and woodland type environments. Justine’s work appears as both staged and natural, so we will create some photos like this as well.
Here are some of my favourite photos from Kurland’s project, girl pictures:
These particular images are exactly the environments we plan to base our photoshoots in.
Claude Cahun was a French photographer, sculptor, and writer. She is best known for her self-portraits in which she assumes a variety of personas, including dandy, weight lifter, aviator, and doll.
Cahun was a Surrealist photographer whose work explored gender identity and the subconscious mind. The artist’s self-portrait from 1928 epitomizes her attitude and style, as she stares defiantly at the camera in an outfit that looks neither conventionally masculine nor feminine.
Cahun used her photos as a device to present her own image and the overworked characteristics of feminine and masculine identity. She was noticed instantly as in her time it was unusual to explore your self identity, no one really did it, never mind to present yourself with characteristics of the opposite gender.
In this image, Cahun has shaved her head and is dressed in men’s clothing. She once explained:
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. Her self-portraits often interrogates space, such as domestic interiors and Jersey landscapes using rock crevasses and granite gate
Cahun uses her persona of body builder as an opposition to gender norms, the words ‘ I AM IN TRAINING DON’T KISS ME’ defy the stereotype of objectifying women. The black and white of the image emphasises the details like her hair, the hearts on her face and the weight she is holding. It also creates contrast between the light and dark and dark features of the image, making her face and thighs stand out more. Cahun’s work is always unusual, but the centre of interest in this image i would say is Cahun’s face, with the hearts standing out.
Clare Rae, an artist from Melbourne, Australia who produces photographs and moving image works that interrogate representations of the female body via an exploration of the physical environment. Rae visited Jersey as part of the Archisle international artist-in-residence programme in 2017. She was researching the Claude Cahun archive, shooting new photography and film in Jersey, as well as running workshops.
Her book ‘never standing on two feet’ was published by Perimeter editions in April 2018.
In her series, Never standing on two feet, Rae considers Cahun’s engagement with the physical and cultural landscapes of Jersey, an aspect of her work that has received little analysis to date. Rae writes:
Like Cahun’s, my photographs depict my body in relation to place; in these instances sites of coastal geography and Jersey’s Neolithic ritual monuments. I enact a visual dialogue between the body and these environments, and test how their photographic histories impact upon contemporary engagements. Cahun used self-portraiture to subvert the dominance of the male gaze in photographic depictions of the female body in the landscape. My practice is invested in the feminist act of self-representation and I draw parallels between my performances of an expanding vocabulary of gesture and Cahun’s overtly performative images of the body expressing a multiplicity of identity. In this series, I tease out the interpretations inherent in landscape photography. I utilise gesture and the performing body to contrast and unsettle traditional representations of the female figure in the landscape
I like her work, she explores identity in a unique way. Rae creates her work to represent the female body, the strength and beauty of it. She says:
My practice at large is informed by feminist theory and considers the implications of representing a woman’s body (my own) in an inherently fetishizing medium. My aim with all my photographs is to subvert the dominant ways we depict women’s subjectivity.
Another site of influence to Clare Rae is Francesca Woodman. At the age of thirteen Francesca Woodman took her first self-portrait. From then, up until her untimely death in 1981, aged just 22, she produced an extraordinary body of work. Comprising some 800 photographs, Woodman’s oeuvre is acclaimed for its singularity of style and range of innovative techniques. From the beginning, her body was both the subject and object in her work.
Francesca Woodman is best known for photographing herself. But her pictures are not self-portraits in the traditional sense. She is often nude or semi-nude and usually seen half hidden or obscured – sometimes by furniture, sometimes by slow exposures that blur her figure into a ghostly presence. These beautiful and yet unsettling images seem fleeting but also suggest a sense of timelessness
Woodman continuously explored and tested what she could do with photography. She challenged the idea that the camera fixes time and space – something that had always been seen as one of the fundamentals of photography. She playfully manipulated light, movement and photographic effects, and used carefully selected props, vintage clothing and decaying interiors to add a mysterious gothic atmosphere to the work.
This is my favourite photo of woodmans. you could say the focal point of the image is the chair with some item of clothing on it, but at the same time the centre of interest is the woman hanging from the door frame. It is majestic and moving, the woman is dressed in draped baggy clothing which could represent a low state of mind and innocence. However, that perspective is changed when you take into account she is hanging and holding herself up from the door frame, implying strength, independence and freedom. This is what Clare Rae meant when she said “My aim with all my photographs is to subvert the dominant ways we depict women’s subjectivity.”
I plan on trying to do a photoshoot inspired by Clare Rae and Francesca Woodman. I will use places and rooms in my house and different buildings, but also attempt to shoot outside as well, using the environment around me to explore identity.
British photographer Sian Davey launched a career in photography in 2014, drawing on her experiences as a psychotherapist and mother to inform her practice.
Her work is an investigation of the psychological landscapes of both herself and those around her. Her family and community are central to her work.
For three years, at a time when most mothers are shut out from their daughters’ lives, Siân Davey shared, and photographed, some of her stepdaughter Martha’s most intimate moments…
Davey is able to capture her daughter doing what she likes with her friends in different, everyday settings. The pictures tell a story of Marthas life whilst being a teenage girl. I’m inspired by Sian Davey’s work as she portrays the theme of femininity/ identity in a natural and real way as her work is not staged.
I aim to base some of my work off of this project. However, Sian shoots in film (I will be using a digital camera) which gives the warm tone effect on the photos, it also makes the photos look sort of old; it works well with the woodland, grassland nature environment of these shoots.
Davey did another photoshoot with a similar theme called ‘The Garden’
“The Garden is a pilgrimage, an intentional act to cultivate a garden that is grounded in love: a reverential offering to humanity. We cleared our long-neglected garden, researched native flowers, soil, biodiversity; sourced organic local seeds, and sowed under the moon cycles, biodynamically. We offered prayers along the way. We invited the pollinators and nature spirits.”
Justine Kurland is a contemporary American photographer. Best known for her large-scale C-prints of rural landscapes inhabited by nude women, Kurland’s surreal images evoke pagan utopias or post-apocalyptic or pre-industrial worlds.
Her work often depicts communes in rural America as her subject matter, inspired by 19th-century idyllic English landscape painting, children’s fairy tales, and Julia Margaret Cameron’s photographs, among others sources.
I am personally interested in her ‘girl pictures’ work. Justine Kurland’s take on the classic American tale of the runaway takes us on a wild ride of freedom, memorializing the fleeting moments of adolescence and its fearless protagonists. She captures pictures of girls in woodland environments, running around, talking, lying down, sitting in trees ect.
Adventure stories were a source of inspiration for this project. But so many of those narratives center around young boys. The girls in Girl Pictures plagiarize these myths until they become their own, until the original myth is hardly relevant anymore.
Her work appears to be a mix of images that are staged and natural. Some of the images are real life and Kurland has captured the moment, other girls are models and staged pictures. Kurland bases a lot of her work, especially her ‘girl pictures’ project on her own experiences and memories of when she was a girl.
The focal point of the image is the back of a young girl who is raising her shirt. Instead of her face, we see the eyes of all the girls surrounding her, watching the big reveal. There’s one boy in the group, but his eyes are covered. A girl has wrapped her arms around him from behind and places her fingers over each of his eyes. It’s funny to see such an obvious removal of the male gaze, especially as it’s still present—and yet the delicate hands of a teenage girl prove capable of obstructing it. As viewers we look from his covered eyes to her watchful ones.
The camera stays just far enough away to keep the subjects slightly anonymous. Or perhaps it’s because they are mostly long haired, or white, or wearing similar clothing, or belonging to that vague age range that captures adolescence. Whatever it is, they begin to blend together into one visually unified group of girls. The gang picking flowers in Daisy Chain, 2000, Kurland’s focus is less on individual girls, and more on what happens when they band together.
But of course with freedom comes the threat of danger. So many of the images in ‘girl pictures’ were taken outside in locations that feel desolate or easy to overlook. They are often staged under bridges or beyond fences or on the sides of highways; places that feel synonymous with warnings. The privacy of the overpass is also potent with all the stories we’ve heard of women getting hurt in such places.
They are anything but harmless in photographs like double headed spit monster where two girls pin a boy down and spit on him, the image captured as the weight of saliva still hangs from one girl’s lips. These “Boy Torture” images are especially playful. There’s a sense of revenge inherent in them, like they are removing the boys from this kind of narrative, asserting their roles as protagonists and defying the stereotypes that men are typically more powerful and dominant, instead, showing that women can be aggressive and commanding.
We see worn out overalls holding onto a girl’s body by one strap in The Wall, 2000 and are only vaguely aware of Huck Finn’s similar getup because there’s something new happening here. The girl at the center of this image guides the others, looking past the camera as if it doesn’t even matter, as if the thing worth examining is actually behind us. What’s left after all this repetition of runaway legends and costumes are the common themes: rebellion, self-sufficiency, confidence. A kind of inverse of the American Dream, but with the same carrot on a string: freedom.
I plan on basing my project partially off Justine Kurlands work. I like her style and the way her photos are simple yet have a deeper meaning too them. I think her work relates to the topic of femininity and represents ‘girly’ things in great and different ways, some being quite cliche but powerful.
Femininity
Mood Board:
Mind Map:
Masculinity
Mood Board:
Mind map:
The google definitions of femininity and masculinity are as such:
Femininity- qualities or attributes regarded as characteristic of women or girls.
Masculinity- qualities or attributes regarded as characteristic of men or boys.
Masculinity is seen to be the trait which emphasizes ambition, acquisition of wealth, and differentiated gender roles. Stereotypical ways to describe a ‘male’ are as such:
Femininity is seen to be the trait which stress caring and nurturing behaviours, sexuality equality, environmental awareness, and more fluid gender roles.
Stereotypical ways to describe a female are as such:
The themes of ‘FEMININITY and MASCULINITY’ are a binary opposite – a pair of related terms or concepts that are opposite in meaning.
Binary opposition originated in Saussurean structuralist theory in Linquistics (scientific study of language) According to Ferdinand de Saussure, binary opposition is the system by which, in language and thought, two theoretical opposites are strictly defined and set off against one another. Using binary opposites can often be very helpful in generating ideas for a photographic project as it provides a framework – a set of boundaries to work within.
ENVIRONMENT/UPBRINGING – This can affect your identity due to how you have been raised, and what values you have been brought up with. It is difficult to change your views after a period of time with how someone else had build these into you.
CULTURAL IDENTITY – Cultural identity can mean a various of things; nationality, ethnicity, race, gender, and religion. Their are many wars that have been created due to different beliefs and stereotypes people have been taught to know. Stereotypes include that; black people are ‘dangerous’ and more likely to cause trouble, after George Floyds death many people unionised and created the BLM movement to contradict this stereotype.
LOSS OF IDENTITY – People that may have lost a part of themselves, or changes who they are: eg. transgender, different pronouns, mental illness, or going through a trauma , may have a different view on identity. This could vary from people that have experienced themselves, people who know people that have experienced something, or people that feel empathetic.
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 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,