Girl on Girl Art and Photography in the Age of the Female Gaze
Charlotte Jansen believes in the power of the front-facing camera. "It really allows yous to command the pic more if y'all're dealing with the self or the body," she says over the telephone from London. The editor at large of gimmicky art and culture publication Elephant Magazine has compiled a photograph and essay book with the work of selected female person photographers, titled "Girl on Girl: Art and Photography in the Historic period of the Female person Gaze," out now.
WWD spoke with Jansen about photography in the historic period of Trump politics and the pornographic roots of her volume's title.
WWD: Why make this book?
Charlotte Jansen: Well, I'm an art journalist, then I wait at a lot of fine art and I am particularly interested in photography — and of course in women. Evidently at that place's been a lot of attending in the final few years on this grouping of young photographers who have come upward through the Internet.
In the volume I've got some of those artists like Mayan Toledano and Petra Collins and Monika Mogi and Maya Fuhr, and I think I was interested in their practice, but also, like, the wider effect of that and also how we're treating those kind of images. Often when we read about those artists I think it'southward quite simplistic how it's contextualized, so I wanted to get a fleck deeper into the practices of those artists and also to explore how they compare with other photographers, and how they're being influenced through the good and the bad in the media.
WWD: Is their popularity through the Internet sort of a theme for the book?
C.J.: No, not all — [simply] that'southward definitely represented in the book. There are a lot of artists who people will recognize from the Internet, because a lot of these images have actually been prevalent. But I definitely wanted to wait at artists that don't fifty-fifty accept an Instagram or social media. If y'all come up beyond their work in a gallery, because we're so used to seeing photographs on the Internet by certain female photographers, does that and so bear on how we interpret and sympathise work by other artists, for improve or worse?
WWD: What was your criteria?
C.J.: My main criteria was that they would be working most prolifically in the last v years, and I kind of wanted to await at what correlates with the introduction of the front-facing camera onto iPhones, because that, for me, is quite an interesting moment in women's photography and photographic practices that take evolved since then.
WWD: What is it about the evolution of the front-facing photographic camera that interests you?
C.J.: Plain, in tandem with that, you've got all of the platforms for sharing and publishing images which have besides had a massive impact on the kinds of images that women are making, and the level of exposure they become. Until then, and still now, a lot of media and magazines are dominated by the male person gaze. I'm not proverb that it's all men in charge necessarily, but that's the kind of imagery that tends to exist in the foreground. So at present you've got publishing platforms that allow women to have simply as wide exposure, just without having to look to exist published.
At the aforementioned fourth dimension, nosotros talk a lot about how the camera is autonomous and accessible for everyone, and the applied science is, like, cheaper and more available now. Specifically for women I think that the front-facing photographic camera actually enables them to kind of have more control over the prototype. I recollect a lot of the women, they're not all using that applied science, only I think they [are] turning the camera on your inner earth, and like photographing your world at home, or the world that you want to run into — creating it or constructing information technology or staging it, rather than going out into the world and photographing "reality," in quotation marks. That's definitely something that I think is very clear in the book, that is very strong now. There are a lot of women doing that.
WWD: What sort of conversation do you hope this book is going to offset?
C.J.: I don't recollect that many people feel very content with that state of affairs. I think in a very small way this volume is trying to survey artists at their best — they're able to visualize a better earth, or at least an alternative world, or to imagine something else, something different. And I think we've never really had that image come from women earlier because our whole history and the whole way the earth is synthetic has been done past men and for men. I hateful, women have not fifty-fifty been considered in about social-political systems for a hundred years. So nosotros're still finding our place.
I think this [book], in a very pocket-sized way, hopefully allows people to run across beyond these labels of, similar, "feminist art" and "femininity," and just meet the female gaze as something that'due south not only for women or something that can just be understood past women. It's simply an culling way of viewing, like an alternative way of seeing. And I personally think women are more able to imagine fluid and flexible social structures, and are able to connect more easily with other people and I think that comes through in a lot of their work.
WWD: With regards to the championship, manifestly in that location'southward the very literal meaning, just it also has sort of a provocation — was that the intention?
C.J.: The title came actually early on — it only seemed really obvious. Obviously, that comes from porn and considering the topic and theme of this book it seemed really right to sort of reclaim that. I retrieve information technology'due south a argument and it'southward empowering, and it'due south too, plainly, a scrap tinged with humor, and so hopefully that comes through. I mean, at that place accept been some funny moments with it already — people just wondering how they're going to Google it, or having to explicate why not to Google that.
Source: https://wwd.com/eye/lifestyle/inside-girl-on-girl-art-and-photography-in-the-age-of-the-female-gaze-10857028/
0 Response to "Girl on Girl Art and Photography in the Age of the Female Gaze"
Enregistrer un commentaire