To choose my final images, I flagged all of the images I liked to put them into one place. I then colour coded the images to grade the to highlight my best images. Green being my favourite/best, and yellow being close to the best.
FINAL IMAGES:
IMAGE COMPARISON:
(left) Nancy Honey- Apple of my eye 1991 (right) My own interpretation
(left) Nancy Honey- Daisy 1980-2010 (right) my own interpretation
(left) Nancy Honey- Daisy 1980-2010 (right) my own interpretation
EVALUATION:
I believe that my photoshoots have gone well. However, I could have benefited from taking more images which would allow me to have a larger variety of images. I think that I have stuck with the theme as well as my artist reference Nancy Honey. My next photoshoots will be more focused on my other artist which I have studied Cindy Sherman.
For my own interpretation of observe seek and challenge I am wanting to explore femininity and the photographic gaze, more specifically the male and female gaze. I will gaining inspiration from Nancy honey who presents her work through a documentary and portraiture style through the observation of typical female stereotypes. And also Cindy Sherman who uses her work to explore and embody the vulnerability of females and how her work could be feeding into the male gaze.
The definition of female gazes is “a feminist theory term referring to the gaze of the female spectator, character or director of an artistic work, but more than the gender it is an issue of representing women as subjects having agency. As such all genders can create films with a female gaze.” I chose this topic of the male gaze as it fits in with the exam theme of ‘Observe, Seek & Challenge’ as ‘the gaze’ is a form of seeking, and can be a very personal topic to many people.
For this final project, I would like to present my study in a photo book form. As a result of this, I intend to produce many photoshoots so that I will have a large variety of images that I can pick from. This means that, I would roughly need a minimum of 30 final images to create my book. I have plans to begin my study for this project as soon as possible to allow me the most amount of time to compete it.
Below are some mood boars from my two artist references; Nancy Honey and Cindy Sherman of whom I am gaining inspiration from:
Born in America in 1948, Nancy Honey began her career in England in a male dominated industry. Regardless of this, she manages to achieve success and started to build a name for herself as a photographer. Nancy Honey’s ‘woman to woman’ series was made nearly over 40 years ago, her images are based on her own experiences of being a woman which were driven by curiosity and focuses on topics such as motherhood, sexuality, power, and ageing in which she uses juxtapositions to depict schoolgirls to businesswomen and children to the elderly, and many more. By doing this, Honey creates a consistent flow throughout her work.
Nancy Honey’s work mainly includes the observation of the typical female stereotypes through her own view on femininity. She presents this by trying to capture “what it feels like, to me, to be a woman today”. Her photo-book is laid out in a triptych format which tend to have some abstract image beside portraits which have similar connotations with one another.
Daisy-
Nancy Honey’s Biography On The Project ‘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. It started when she was a year old and I was just beginning to then use my little black and white camera to document events, more or less as a diary. I was finally beginning to learn about the technical side of photography, which I’d always loved, but had been intimidated by the science.
I had always been an artist, but mostly used painting and drawing, having initially studied Fine Art in the USA. After having children I was desperate to complete my education and finished with a degree in Visual Communication at Bath Academy of Art in Wiltshire. I learned about photography there as well as typography and printmaking. 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.The Independent on Saturday Magazine, published an article in 2002, which covers these photographs and our time together. When she left home the arrangement, by then mostly for commercial work, had to be more formal. The project more or less finished after Billy, her first child was born and she was very busy and lived out of town. I still photograph her and her children often, but the pictures are not made in the same manner.
Cindy Sherman is an American photographer and artist who plays on the female stereotypes. Her Untitled Film Stills includes over seventy black and white images which were made between 1977 and 1980. This series embodies the disguise, mystery, voyeurism and vulnerability in which women hold. Her work could be viewed as feeding into the ‘Male Gaze’ due to a handful of her images being staged in a heterosexual perspective which could be viewed as sexualising women. Cindy Sherman embodied many different roles while creating her photo series, she styled many of the models clothes, hair and makeup wile also being her own model.
Cindy Sherman has always experimented with different identities. Just after she moved to New York, she produced her Untitled Film Still series (1977–80) , in which she used disguises and photographed herself in many different location settings with a conscious understanding of what props she wanted to use to create scenes which resembled those from mid-20th-century movies. These images rely on female characters such as the jaded seductress, the unhappy housewife, the jilted lover, and the vulnerable naïf. Cindy Sherman used cinematic understanding to structure these photographs. The untitled series immediately became topics of conversations about feminism, postmodernism, and representation, and they remain some of her best-known work.
Many pictures of Cindy Sherman’s Untitled Film Stills show situations that can come across as uncomfortable, promiscuous since it show a depicted woman in a vulnerable position. Cindy Sherman confronts people with the negative implications of the way the media depicts women especially in movies through the way she positions herself in her images which leaves an open door for men to objectify the female body. The male gaze is often present in her but she subtly changes the perspectives, expressions, and circumstances.
This mood board has been inspired by some of the photographers I saw in a photography exhibition in Paris. it includes images by Rene Groebil, Robert Mapplethorpe, Ralph Gibson and Cindy Sherman plus many more.
A call to someone to participate in a competitive situation or fight to decide who is superior in terms of ability or strength.
“he accepted the challenge”
2. A call to prove or justify something.
“a challenge to the legality of the banning order”
verb:
invite (someone) to engage in a contest. “he challenged one of my men to a duel”
2.dispute the truth or validity of.”it is possible to challenge the report’s assumptions”
Below I have created a mind map of words in which associate with the theme of observe, seek and challenge. By doing this I have come up with many things that I could do for my project.
