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.

OBSERVE

VERB

1. a person who watches or notices something.’to a casual observer, he was at peace’.
2. a person who follows events closely and comments publicly on them. ;some observers expect interest rates to rise’.
3. a person posted in an official capacity to an area to monitor political or military events ‘elections scrutinized by international observers.’
4. SYNONYMS: spectator, onlooker, watcher, voyeur, looker on, fly on the wall, viewer, witness, eyewitness, bystander, sightseer, commentator, reporter, blogger, monitor.

SEEK

VERB

1. attempt to find (something):’they came here to seek shelter from biting winter winds’ :SIMILAR: look for, be on the lookout for, search for, try to find, look about for
2. attempt or desire to obtain or achieve (something): ‘the new regime sought his extradition’. ‘her parents had never sought to interfere with her freedom’ SIMILAR: pursue, go after, go for, tr, attempt, endeavour, strive.
3. ask for (something) from someone: ‘he sought help from the police’. SIMILAR: ask for, request solicit, call on, invite, entre, beg for
4. (SEEK SOMEONE/SOMETHING OUT)

CHALLENGE

1. To call to someone to participate in a competitive situation or fight to decide who is superior in terms of ability or strength. SIMILAR: dare, provocation, summons
2. a call to prove or justify something ‘a challenge to the legality of the banning order’. SIMILAR: opposition, defiance, ultimatum, confrontation with.

VERB

1. invite (someone) to engage in a contest. SIMILAR: dare, summon, invite, bid, throw down the gauntlet, to defy someone to do something.
2. dispute the truth or validity of: ‘it is possible to challenge the reports assumptions’ SIMILAR: question, take exception to, confront, dispute, take issue with.

What?

I will be photographing bubbles like the ones in Kawauchi’s work. I will also possibly explore photographing some ordinary objects and scenes like the other artists I looked at.

Where?

At home, perhaps also in surrounding area for some plant related images.

When?

In daytime for outdoor images (especially with good sunlight) and any time for indoor images.

How?

I will be using a tripod to take these images as I will be using a small aperture and large shutter speed which will increase camera shake. I may even choose to use a flash at some point.

Statement

My intent for this project is to focus on the strategies and tactics behind games such as chess, checkers, cards etc. I will be photographing both people playing the games as well as the actual pieces themselves in addition to taking images that represent my artists references while sticking to my theme of games. My reason behind this idea of games is that it links into the theme of observe seek and challenge since we observe our opponents, the pieces and the game itself all while seeking to win and beat our opposition. The challenge is the game itself, coming up with strategies and tactics to best the person we are playing against.

When presenting my study I plan to create both a photo book as well as prints that I will manually edit. The main aesthetic that I plan to go for is contrasted black and white photos, while also having some of my images in colour but keeping the tones muted. This way, my images will all fit together when producing my photo book or prints as they will have a consistent theme while also remaining interesting to the viewer as it will cause them to focus more on the details in the photograph. In order to accomplish this I will be using Light room classic as well as Photoshop if need be to edit my images.