“I wish I could treat every day as Halloween, and get dressed
up and go out into the world as some eccentric character.”

Cindy Sherman

MOODBOARD:

Sherman’s work is relevant to the exam theme Observe, Seek, and Challenge. Sherman fit’s the theme by ‘observing‘ women’s gender stereotypes. She does this by exploring the idea of Mulvey’s theory ‘The Male Gaze’ which can be defined as ‘that states that cinema narratives and portrayals of women in cinema are constructed in an objectifying and limiting manner to satisfy the psychological desires of men, and more broadly, of patriarchal society’. She produces self portrait images that reinforce dominant ideologies of women; as submissive and the homemaker and how ultimately women are objectified and an accessory to men. Sherman’s main projects show the stereotypical views of women, how they are stereotyped to cleaning, cooking, and be submissive, however Sherman also produced a project which she ‘challenged‘ the dominant beauty standards reinforced by men and their definition in how a woman should look like ‘the perfect girl’. She presented this in a hyper-realistic form. In her project she created distorted faces, of women wearing over the top makeup, therefore challenging the beauty industry by creating these parodic images. Parody imitates the style of a particular creator with deliberate exaggerations for comedic effect. Satire uses humour to comment on the world-at-large, particularly in the context of politics. The politic that Sherman is trying to discuss in her photography is feminism, which the suffragettes fought for voting rights for woman. Sherman reinforces this feministic movement with the contrasting images in a parodic way to explore the unrealistic standards that society sets woman.

WHO IS CINDY SHERMAN?

Cindy Sherman was born in 1954 in Glen Ridge, New Jersey, Cindy Sherman lives and works in New York NY. 

Sherman is an American artist whose work consists primarily of photographic self-portraits, depicting herself in many different contexts and as various imagined characters. In her early work Sherman explored the conventions and stereotypes of how women are portrayed in films and TV, usually in the view of the ‘male gaze’ as many of the films on TV made more profit by sexualising women. Sherman was always interested in experimenting with different identities. As she has explained, “I wish I could treat every day as Halloween, and get dressed up and go out into the world as some eccentric character.” This quote stated by Sherman suggests that she enjoys taking parodic images in order to try and reach the audience that views her work, perhaps she believes the only way to engage with people is through satire humour. These images rely on female characters (and caricatures) such as the jaded seductress, the unhappy housewife, the jilted lover, and the vulnerable naif. Sherman used cinematic conventions to structure these photographs: they recall the film stills used to promote movies, from which the series takes its title.

She further explores the idea of sexual desire and domination, the fashioning of self-identity as mass deception, these are among the unsettling subjects lying behind Sherman’s extensive series of self-portraiture in various guises. Sherman’s work is central in the era of intense consumerism and image proliferation at the close of the 20th century.

Cindy Sherman was on the cover of the gentlewoman magazine for the 2019 spring/summer edition. On the gentlewoman magazine digital page, their intent is to celebrate ‘modern women of style and purpose. Its fabulous biannual magazine offers a fresh and intelligent perspective on fashion that’s focused on personal style – the way women actually look, think and dress. Featuring ambitious journalism and photography of the highest quality, it showcases inspirational women through its distinctive combination of glamour, personality and warmth. These qualities are also at the heart of its website, thegentlewoman.com, a virtual place where real women, real events and real things are enjoyed.’ Sherman being found of the cover of this feminist magazine reinforces her feminist movements, and what she is trying to establish through her own photography work.

IMAGE ANALYSIS:

EMOTIONAL RESPONSE:

Looking at this image, I can identify Sherman’s intent to highlight the issues of woman stereotypes. Due to all the feminist movements and yet still technically living in a patriarchal society, Sherman trying to establish a movement through photography allows many woman to identify will her Untitled Film Stills. A dominant ideology that is still present in todays society is that woman are submissive to men, and they do all the domestic work which is was Sherman shows within this image. By standing in the kitchen in what seems like she cleaning still shows the views of woman in todays society and yet how stereotypes can still be observed and such a dominant factor.

VISUAL/TECHNICAL – The information we see:

The image is presented in black and white. Sherman created this Untitled Film Stills in black and white to try and replicate the 1950’s films and film noir, which are primarily presented in black and white. The lighting in the image seems to be coming from an artificial light, perhaps a lightbulb in the room due to the slight shadow seen on the wall in the background due to Sherman stance. Sherman is looking away from the camera, it may be due to the fact of her displaying the role of a 90’s woman that were seen as nurturing and passive therefore would not have the confidence to look directly into the camera. The camera is positioned slightly at an angle which could be to show some of Sherman’s curves as she is standing slightly to the side with her arm on her stomach, which has the connotations the idea of woman being delicate and in need of male attention. However the angle could also be a counter-type to these dominant ideologies of woman due to the angle slightly pointing upwards which establishes dominance and power, which is a contrast to the dominant stereotypes around woman.

CONCEPTUAL/CONTEXTUAL – The reasoning behind the image/Surrounding circumstance/information and knowledge

Cindy Sherman’s Untitled Film Stills is a suite of seventy black-and-white photographs in which the artist posed in the guises of various generic female film characters, among them, ingénue, working girl, vamp, and lonely housewife. Sherman staged these woman to resemble scenes from 1950s and ’60s Hollywood, film noir, B movies, and European art-house films. By photographing herself she inserts herself into challenging the stereotypical views of woman. However, in her Untitled Film Series these photographs are not classified as self-portraits, as Sherman explained to the New York Times she often didn’t’t see herself in these picture, rather she thought she disappeared while creating the character. Sherman found her signature approach to photographic self-portraiture while still a student, observing, “I don’t know if it was therapeutic, out of boredom, or my own fascination with thinking about make-up in the mid-seventies… I had this desire to transform myself”.

BIBLIOGRAPHY:

https://www.moma.org/artists/5392#:~:text=Cynthia%20Morris%20Sherman%20(born%201954,and%20as%20various%20imagined%20characters.

https://www.theartstory.org/artist/sherman-cindy/#:~:text=Sexual%20desire%20and%20domination%2C%20the,close%20of%20the%2020th%20century.

https://www.thecollector.com/cindy-sherman-self-portraits/

Thomas Demand

Thomas Demand is a German Photographer, who is known for his cardboard and paper models of docile areas, which include things like empty office buildings which have printers and computers like a regular office building, and other strange environments including unique settings. He was born in 1964 Germany and Throughout his education became interested in the practice of sculpture, where he found inspirational images through photographers like Hilla Becher, who’s work involved portraits of specific structures, and even sculptures like Richard Tuttle. As Demand developed his sculptures he consistently started using just paper, and found an interesting concept of environments which are common to what we use as people in society, like the inside of office buildings, and photographing them in a way which present an emptiness of people but a recognition of the environment. The meaning behind his sculptures are mostly political, and show an environment of political and historical instances. What’s interesting about his practice is that after he’s completed a sculpture and photographed it, but then destroying it, showing a disconnection between holding onto things, and represents value in its own way, but also creates a more valued image after he has photographed the environment.

In an interview with Will Wiles, the interviewer describes Demands work as, “his banal and ordinary environments often have sinister connections and meanings”, implying the mystery behind just the visual aspects of his work and how contextually it creates an off putting sensation, as if there is something slightly wrong or familiar but you don’t know exactly what. Demand goes on to say, “It triggers your picture library to spill something out,” which means that his work without knowing the context or meaning is supposed to present almost a sense of nostalgia/familiarity which creates a similar memory or thought to present itself.

What I personally like about Demands work is the concepts behind his work, and how he does sculpture environments just for fun, but rather with a meaning behind it (mostly political and emotional). For example this image above is called the “Corridor (1996)”, and is a representation of Jeffery Dahmer’s apartments. What’s specifically interesting about his design of his sculptures is that whilst it looks like a simple design it crates a sense of fear and eeriness, and is photographed at an angle which conveys the emotion that Demand wants to express in his sculptures and photographs. Furthermore, I like how Demand creates these sculptures just to photograph, and not for it to be a long living sculpture as he destroys it, which I personally think makes the image more distorted and uncanny. His use of depth, lines, and lighting all works together to create the representation of his images meaning.

Thomas Demands work can be related to the concept of “liminal space” because of the sculptures being visually transitional, as if you are the POV of the image walking through a hallway. But also how his work conveys the same sensations as Liminal space photography, which is through disconnection, and disorientation from first sight. I will respond to his work with attempting to create my own type of images that present this aesthetic of messy and empty areas which feel eerie, I will captures environments like docile office buildings and empty hotel hall ways which use the consistency of repetition in shapes and depth, as if it never ends, or there is an entrance to the unknown at the end of the hallway.

Mood board and Mind Map

The Theme Observe, seek, challenge

Observe

An observation is an action or processes of noticing details of something or someone in order to gain information. To be observant is to notice significant details.

Seek

Attempt to find something, the desire to obtain or achieve (something).

Challenge

A call to prove or justify something, to dispute the truth or validity of

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

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. 

Nancy Honey

Bio

Nancy Honey (born 1948) is a UK-based American documentary and portrait photographer. Her work focuses on the lives of women, autobiographical, collaborative and documentary. She has been photographing for more than 40 years and has studied fine art, graphic design and photography in the United States and the United Kingdom. She has received many awards and commissions for her widely publicised work.

Nancy Honey’s personal work is just that – personal. Made over nearly 40 years, her images draw on her own experiences to consider topics such as motherhood, sexuality, power, and ageing. But though they’re framed by her biography, her projects look outwards, depicting and recording everyone from schoolgirls to businesswomen, infants to the elderly, models and bus passengers.

Her works

Woman to Woman

“In this body of work I set out to define and separate the various strands that make up my sense of my own femininity. How does sexuality manifest itself in me and what is the difference between what I feel and the ubiquitous stereotypical mass cultural images that surround me? How conditioned are my responses?” – Honey on the project

It consists of 22 colour triptychs.

Honey uses this quote from John Berger’s academic work to describe the project:

“A woman must continually watch herself. She is almost continually accompanied by her own image of herself, whilst she is walking across a room or whilst she is weeping at the death of her father, she can scarcely avoid envisaging walking or weeping. From earliest childhood she has been taught and persuaded to survey herself continually.”— Ways of Seeing, John Berger, 1972

Project on her website

Daisy

“This is a large collection of pictures I made with my daughter, Daisy over many years. I became fascinated with photographing her as I emerged as a photographic artist. She and I did it together and it was something I greatly enjoyed.” -Honey on this project

“I continued to make pictures of Daisy over many years and included her in every project I could. My son, Jesse, declared that making pictures together was boring early on and therefore I made far less which included him.

The project, which was never a formal one, just kept evolving. She was very good natured and patient and rarely refused.”

Project on her website

100 Leading Ladies

“During 2012-2014, I endeavoured to photograph 100 of Britain’s most respected women over the age of 55; from academics to entrepreneurs, fashion designers to composers. The Leading Ladies all share one thing in common; they are leading figures in their fields and have defied gender stereotypes.”

“I invited each woman to select a place of inspiration for their portrait setting, affording the viewer further insight into the lives, personalities and character of these admirable women.”

The photos were first exhibited at Somerset House, London in 2014. The exhibition toured the UK for 2 years afterwards.

Project on her website

Some more of her major/most well known works

I think this image represents the female gaze very well, even if the image is of a nude woman, it is taken in a way to show the natural beauty of the woman, not the idealistic view that can be seen in the male gaze. The natural light coming into the room really enforces the natural view of the female gaze

Femininity

Moodboard

Mindmap

Masculinity

Moodboard

Mindmap

Identity

Using different gazes of the genders to explore stereotypes in gender/sexuality

• Observe: Viewing how each gender sees the opposite and their own gender (i.e. women looking at men vs women)
• Seek: Look for other people’s views on gender and gender stereotypes
• Challenge: Looking at different gender stereotypes and going against them (masculinity vs femininity)

Photoshoot ideas:

• Using people of different genders to photograph and be part of different images using their own gaze to create them.
• Using the artists referenced (Yuri Yasumasa, Claude Cahun and Nancy Honey) to explore how the different genders view each gender
• Experimenting with gender fluidity and identity

To understand the difference between the female and male gaze, it is important to look at how both are viewed in society.

The male gaze focuses more on the power that is held within the gaze, rather than the degradation of a woman. Objectification comes more from the viewers rather than the initial male gaze we see. The male gaze is represented more so by the power which is held in his look, leaning more towards the ego that is taking place in the man. This idea is that he is looking at a woman; in his mind, she is already his. The male gaze and objectification both share the similarity of high egos being involved, meaning that they are degrading women to get themselves higher. When looking at the male gaze, it becomes quite clear that this is the lens cinema has been casting for decades.  “The man controls the film phantasy and also emerges as the representative of power in a further sense”. There is this stereotypical viewpoint on women that cannot be escaped by the male gaze, which I also see as the gaze of society.

After understanding the male gaze, it is appropriate to believe the female gaze is quite opposite of that. It is a way of speaking and listening, rather than the action and chaos that fills a screen. As well as, looking through the lens of both desire and detail that take place in a women’s cinema. Allowing there to be this connection to desire, but in a way that isn’t just purely sexual. I also think that the female gaze can be viewed in a few different ways. The female gaze is how women view themselves. That there is finally this ability to look in, rather than just the reflection of how society has wanted to see us. There is also the definition of the world being viewed from a female gaze, meaning more feminine without the purpose of benefiting men. I do believe the two definitions I have named also tend to intertwine with each other.

What is the Photographic Gaze?

The gaze, as a visual act, generates modes of power, domination, and control. It has the ability to categorize people, generate feelings of shame, and assert one’s superiority. The gaze of the superior and privileged person, specifically directed toward oppressed and less privileged groups of people, is one type of the manifestation of power and control.

The camera lens is another demonstration of a powerful gaze, referred to as the photographic gaze, simulating the gaze of the naked eye. Indeed, the former could even be more powerful than the gaze of the naked eye due to photographic permanence. Susan Sontag in On Photography notes that “photographs are a neat slice of time, not a flow” (17). It is the stillness of a photograph that gives it power and makes it more effective than television broadcasting or film. Photography, then, has the ability to capture in “still time” the expression of oppressed subjects as the camera gazes at them.

John Berger’s In Ways Of Seeing

In Ways of Seeing, a highly influential book based on a BBC television series, John Berger observed that ‘according to usage and conventions which are at last being questioned but have by no means been overcome – men act and women appear. Men look at women. Women watch themselves being looked at’ (Berger 1972, 45, 47).

Writing in 1972, Berger insisted that women were still ‘depicted in a different way to men – because the “ideal” spectator is always assumed to be male and the image of the woman is designed to flatter him’ (ibid., 64). In 1996 Jib Fowles still felt able to insist that ‘in advertising males gaze, and females are gazed at’ (Fowles 1996, 204). And Paul Messaris notes that female models in ads addressed to women ‘treat the lens as a substitute for the eye of an imaginary male onlooker,’ adding that ‘it could be argued that when women look at these ads, they are actually seeing themselves as a man might see them’ (Messaris 1997, 41). We may note that within this dominant representational tradition the spectator is typically assumed not simply to be male but also to be heterosexual, over the age of puberty and often also white.