Photoshoots – Marilyn Monroe inspired

For our photoshoot we took a total of 213 images. Before I began editing them, I firstly flagged my favourite ones. I ended up having 50 flagged images from 2 photoshoots.

After I flagged the images I narrowed them down again by selecting my favourites from them and making them green, I flagged 50 photos and then narrowed them down to 12, these are the images I edited.

I started editing these photos to have the same vibe as Marilyn Monroe’s photographed images in the 50s/60s. This means that they all fit the theme of femininity and also had either a vibrant/vintage colour or black and white which she was photographed a lot in.

In the end I narrowed it down to my favourite 9 images. These were personally my favourite as I love the way it portrays the vibe perfectly of Marilyn Monroe’s images. These images to me represent femininity perfectly.

This was a favourite of mine because I love the way the jewellery is presented on her wrist, the gold and the pearls represent femininity, especially Marilyn Monroe as pearls were a signature look for her. I made the image more vibrant as it looked dull before as there was just plain lighting when we took it. The red lipstick is also a major part of this image. It is a signature look of Marilyn Monroe’s, and it also represents femininity as the red lip colour gained popularity internationally as women’s rights movements spread worldwide.

For the image I made sure to add vibrancy and colour. This made the image more colourful and gave it a vintage look, it also made the red lipstick pop and that makes it a main focus of the image and that was a goal when we decided we wanted Marilyn Monroe as inspiration.

This was another one of my favourite images as I think it represents femininity well. putting lipstick on in the mirror is something that all females do and I think it fits the theme of having Marilyn Monroe as inspiration for these images as she had the signature red lip. The thing that pops out most in this photo is that I am putting on the lipstick which shows similarities with Marilyn Monroe.

For this image I made it black and white as I took inspiration from an image I found on Marilyn Monroe which was black and white with her applying lipstick. I turned the exposure up as we were in a dark room with one light which made the photo give a spotlight effect on me and the mirror and everything else around was dark and not visible making there no other distractions in the image.

I chose this photo as the signature pout is very feminine. Marilyn Monroe was known for pouting which is why I chose this photo. The eyes not focussed on the camera give a bit of a dumb look which Marilyn Monroe was known for playing the role of “Dumb blondes” which is what we tried to resemble in these photoshoots.

I turned up the temperature and tint as it gave a vintage look in the photo which was also key in doing so in the image. I turned down all highlights, exposure and whites as originally the image was very bright as we had the light right in front of the model. This also gave the effect that we had a spotlight on her which can also show that Marilyn was always in the spotlight when she was photographed. I used the spot remover on this photo as there were lots of specs in the mirror and on the floor.

Personally I love this photo as it looks very classy and elegant. the straight hair swept to the side is key for the image as it shows of the pearls that she is wearing. The hand going through the hair is very feminine with the painted nails which are a dark red colour but just look black in the image as I made it black and white.

I didn’t change much for this photo as it was already practically perfect, I did change it to black and white then turned up the exposure a little bit to make it visible where you can see where she is.

I love this photo because it looks very angelic and feminine. The warm tones in and on the mirror make it look very golden and warm tones while on the boarder of the image it is cool toned. This is also inspired by Marilyn Monroe as she also is applying the red lipstick in the mirror like she did in one of her photos.

I turned up all highlights and made the image colourful with different warm and cool tones in it. I like the way that the colours go from warm to cold from the centre going outwards.

I added an effect to this image and it made it look very angelic and pretty. I chose to add this to this image because I really like the way it adds a different and unique twist to the photo.

This picture I experimented with because it felt like the type of photo I could do a lot with. I focussed a lot on femininity with all of these photos and stereotypically pink is the most feminine colour so I used it to create this image. I love the way it contrasts with the black background to make it really stand out.

I didn’t do much with the basic tools as it wasn’t necessary to do. I did edit the texture the most as when I changed the tone it was the thing that stood out most on the model and in the background. The green Tone curve I turned to a light purple and the red tone curve I changed to red to make it a bright vibrant pink colour.

This is a really sweet image it is stereotypically very feminine as women were stereotyped to be caring and soft.

I turned up the temperature and vibrancy in the image to make the colours stand out more I really liked how it ended up looking especially with the red lipstick. I turned down shadows and highlights to make the subject obvious and stand out in the photo as in the original photo she was just blending in with the background.

This photo shows femininity to me by the jewellery, the gold and the pearls mixed together make it very feminine. I also used the radial filter which added a luminescent glow in the necklaces to make them look magical.

I used most of the basic tools for this photo to make it vibrant and colourful. I think this photo is really simple and it doesn’t n

This photo is very basic but it goes nicely with the theme of chosen images it is very simple but it matches with all of my other selected photos.

I edited this image minimally but enough where it looks cleaner and simpler.

This picture I experimented with on photoshop. I created a collage of Marilyn Monroe pictures which I thought looked really good with my photo. I love the way this turned out because the image layering of my image on top of the selected Marilyn Monroe images I found goes really nicely with the photograph I took.

Theory/Context

Identity politics

Identity politics are politics based on a certain identity for example:

• Nationality
• Race
• Culture
• Religion
• Gender
• Social background
• Social class

Its aim is to support and centre the concerns, agendas and projects of particular groups in accord with specific social and political changes.

Culture wars

Culture wars are cultural conflicts between social groups and the struggle for dominance of their values, beliefs and practises. It commonly refers to topics on which their is societal disagreement and polarisation in societal values is seen.

The term is commonly used to describe contemporary politics in the western democracies with issues such as abortion, homosexuality, transgender rights, pornography, multiculturalism, racial viewpoints and other cultural conflicts based on views, morality and lifestyle being described and the major political cleavage.

Marilyn Monroe Inspiration

My photoshoot will be based on Marilyn Monroe. Marilyn Monroe was an American actress, model and singer. Known for playing comic “blonde bombshell” characters. I have worked with two other students to make this photoshoot work well. All of us are blonde so we were inspired by Marilyn Monroe and how she was associated with femininity in the 50s for this photoshoot.

What was so special about Marilyn Monroe?

Her early image as a dumb and seductive blonde gave way in later years to the tragic figure of a sensitive and insecure woman unable to escape the pressures of Hollywood. Her vulnerability and sensuousness combined with her needless death eventually raised her to the status of an American cultural icon.

Inspiration Mood Board

The Plan

For the photoshoot we will try and use a similar approach to her pictures. Lots of her outfits are very glam, but lots are also quite casual and we will try and resemble these in a modern way. We plan to wear pearls and lipstick as it was a signature look for Marilyn. We will go for casual clothes with glamourous jewellery and make-up as that is a main part of why she is so iconic.

Cindy Sherman

The art historical canon was heavily criticized for its lack of female artists and widespread use of stereotypical images of women. Some female artists began to use their work as a means of re-representing female identity and deconstructing prevailing cultural expectations of femininity. One of these was contemporary artists Cindy Sherman who, in her photographs, takes on the role of many female identities found throughout Western culture. These photographs portray struggles over women’s identity and the way we come to know and understand ourselves through culture, and can be critically analysed using feminist social constructionist theories that challenge the idea of a fixed femininity.

In Sherman’s Hollywood-like stills, she alters her identity using filmmaking tools such as costume, lighting, setting and composition

Sherman deliberately gave up the conventions of fashion photography, causing French vogue to ultimately reject the works for their magazine. However, other fashion editors and designers received her works enthusiastically.

In this photo it shows a woman in the kitchen, this is stereotyped as femininity as women were stereotyped to cook and care for themselves and the family etc. This would show challenging femininity in the 20th century because of how the woman is photographed. The shopping bag is ripped on the floor and the woman is picking it up.

Claude Cahun

Claude Cahun, born Lucy Schwob was a French surrealist photographer, sculptor, and writer. Lucy took to the name, Claude Cahun in 1914. Cahun is best known as a writer and self-portraitist, who assumed a variety of performative personae

Cahun’s connection with Jersey began early, with childhood holidays spent in Jersey and Brittany. She was born Lucy Schwob in Nantes, France to a wealthy Jewish family. But in her late teens and early twenties Cahun had been looking for a new, gender-neutral name for a while. She fixed on the name Claude Cahun in 1918. At that time she was in a same-sex relationship with Suzanne Malherbe, who used the name Marcel Moore. They had become step sisters in their mid-teens and at some point a closer relationship developed.

 Initially they found life in Jersey to be a ‘holiday without end.’ But with the prospect of a Nazi invasion of Jersey looking very likely in 1940, they refused to be evacuated back to England. Instead the women decided to mount an underground resistance campaign following the Nazi’s occupation of the Island in June 1940. Their campaign largely took the form of propaganda in the form of fake news sheets, authored by listening to the BBC on an illegal radio and then translated into German by Moore. These were left in places German soldiers might find them.

Cahun and Moore ended up in prison in St Helier and narrowly avoided a sentence of death. They remained in jail until 9 May 1945, the day Jersey was liberated. in late 1954, Cahun was taken into hospital and died on 8 December, aged 60. Moore lived on in Jersey until 1972, when she ended her own life.

This photograph to me, represents the challenge of normality of identity in the 20th century. I find this photo the most intriguing, as Claude Cahun shaved her head to challenge the gender roles and show her own way of self expression. In this photo Claude Cahun is presented in a very masculine way, the way she had positioned herself is very a very masculine pose but the patterned clothes and mirror add a feminine vibe to a masculine photo. The way she has positioned herself next to the mirror looking into the camera with the mirror reflecting her eyes to look away could add to the stereotype that men are confident and will look straight into your eyes and that women are more shy, timid and less confident than men.

Femininity Mood board

Masculinity Mood board

What is Femininity

Femininity is mainly associated with women and girls. and there is some evidence that some behaviours considered feminine are influenced by both cultural factors and biological factors. Femininity can be influenced by places, society and family etc.

The term ‘femininity’ has been adapted over time, for example in the 20th century women were expected to be:

• Passive
• Sensitive
• Emotional
• Gentle
• Caring

Women were often valued for how they looked and not what they did. Looks and behaviours contribute to being feminine like having softer features, long hair and a smaller frame and curves. While these are all stereotypical ideas, women have and continue to move forward in the world.

These photos show the evolution of what is perceived as femininity and women throughout the last century

1920s

1930s

1940s

1950s

1960s

1970s

1980s

1990s

2000

2010

2020

Nowadays, women can be and feel like whatever and whoever they want to be as the world is a much more open place.

This is stereotypically how femininity can be shown but lots of women feel as if they do not fit into the category of being stereotypically “feminine”. This means that women who don’t feel like they fit into being feminine, can be transgender and feel comfortable and more belonging as a male.

What is Masculinity

Masculinity is mainly associated with men and boys. and there is evidence that some behaviours considered masculine are influenced by both cultural factors and biological factors. Masculinity can also be influenced by places, society and family.

Masculinity can be described as:

• Strength
• Courage
• Independence
• Leadership
• Assertiveness

A patriarchal perspective sees men as rational and normality. In the 20th century men were seen as the “household heads” where they would provide and care for their family and home. The looks and behaviours of a stereotypical male would be wider faces, broader and prominent features and more facial and body hair.

These photos show the evolution of how masculinity is perceived throughout the last century

1920s

1930s

1940s

1950s

1960s

1970s

1980s

1990s

2000s

2010s

2020s

Binary Opposites

A binary opposition is a pair of related terms or concepts that are opposite in meaning. Some examples would be:

• Positive V Negative
• Male V Female
• Good V Bad
• Young V old
• Strong V Weak

Femininity and masculinity are seen as binary opposites, this is because of the theory that “Man” and “woman” have been opposed as binary oppositional terms since patriarchal society was formed.

Gender Identity

Gender identity is your sense of whether you are a man, woman, nonbinary, gender fluid or a combination of one or more of these identities. It’s part of your sense of self. It’s how you understand who you are and how you interact with others.

These are the final photos we took for the diamond cameo. For the actual photos we made the model look towards the camera, left and right for the cameo. while editing I made them all black and white because I thought it would look best for the type of design I would like the end result to look like. Then I put the exposure up as when I turned the pictures to black and white they all looked really dark and the model blended in with the background. I turned down the texture and clarity to get rid of any unwanted textures like the curtain in the background.

Final Diamond Cameo

This is the final cameo. I chose a white background for it as I didn’t like an olden day look to these images, so I liked the plain white background with the black and white images standing out. It gave these images a modern style which I preferred. The model is posing seriously as the diamond cameo is showing all angles of the face which I personally preferred a neutral and more serious look for.

Henry Mullins started working  230 Regent Street in London in the 1840s and moved to Jersey in July 1848, setting up a studio known as the Royal Saloon at 7 Royal Square. His speciality was Cartes de visite and the photographic archive of La Société contains a massive collection of these. After his death his collection of over 20,000 pictures was acquired in 1883 by Clarence Philip Ouless and formed part of his collection which was given to La Société in 2006. he had a collection of over 9,000 portraits of Jersey residents.

These images are only a small portion of the large amount of images he took, these images would then be placed into an album, presented as Carte De Visite:

Carte De Visite:

Henry Mullins specialised in Cartes de visite, it is presented widely in the photographic archive of La Société and the online archive contains 9600 images. The Carte De Visite is described as the first commercial photographic print produced using egg whites to bind the photographic chemicals to the paper and this is would be very rare to see now. This consisted of a small thin photograph mounted onto a thicker piece of card, however Mullins placed his work into an album.

Diamond Cameo:

This layout of final images is called a Diamond cameo because of diamond-like shape made by the placement of oval images. I personally like this layout form because it makes it interesting by showing all the angles of his face.