Beauty Hurts?

Now that my first year at Uni is drawing to a close, I have a bit more free time to engage in some leisure activities. I really used to enjoy reading, I just haven't really had much time to do any in the last year, except for informative books as part of research work. The last week or so I have got back to reading "Pin Up Grrrls: Feminism, Sexuality and Popular Culture" (Buszek, 2006). It is a really interesting read for anybody interested in this topic, and one part of the book which grabbed my attention was former porn star Annie Sprinkle's Anatomy of A 1980’s Pin Up. It reminded me of a piece of work by the feminist activist Andrea Dworkins who argued against highly sexualised imagery of women and claimed that women’s bodies where exploited by the way they are represented in porn. In her image Beauty Hurts Dworkin’s deconstructs the sexualised female body in terms of what they do to “get ready” in the mornings. She breaks down the body into different parts and states everything a woman must do to make it attractive, presumably for the satisfaction of men. Similarly,  Sprinkle's piece of work used this same layout and idea. In Anatomy of A 1980’s Pin Up she presents the viewer with a photo of herself and then has added text to point out all the manipulations that are carried out on the body of a woman, it almost looks like a photographic version of Dworkin’s diagram. However she has put a different spin on it, whereas Beauty Hurts looks like it could be straight out a text-book, Sprinkle has made hers cartoony, light-hearted and comical. Notes added to the image such as “corset hides a very big belly”  are to remind us that the whole “look” of the porn star is faked, an illusion to give the impression of the “perfect body”. These notes remind us that it is not real, it’s all trickery, smoke and lights. Unlike the connotations of pain and humiliation in Dworkin’s image, Sprinkle’s pin-up image suggests that women can take control of, deconstruct and find pleasure in the representation of their bodies and sexuality. She has created other performance works that provoke debate and show from her personal experience how much the body is manipulated for the purpose of fantasy within the sex industry. She doesn’t pass judgement or say that it’s bad, she just raises awareness that it is fantasy and not real. 

Beauty Hurts

Anatomy of a 1980's Pin Up

The Virgin Suicides

I am really inspired by the movies of Sofia Copploa, the mise en scene is always spot on. Her movies nearly always have the theme of loneliness and isolation, the two charcters in Lost in Translation, the teenage girls in The Virgin Suicides, the title character in Marie Antoinette, Coppola has developed her own distinct style of putting this across. There’s something about the whole aesthetics of her films, the delicate lighting, the faded colour palette, the feminine “look” of them that I find really appealing.

I re-watched the Virign Suicdes today and was reminded just how inspiring I find the imagery in it. Coppola has obviously paid very close attention in the story boarding of the film as every shot is perfectly framed to tell each part of the story.  I want to do a photo shoot which pays homage to this film. I’m going to find models and try and shoot this in the next couple of weeks, watch this space for the results! Here are stills from the movie which I will be using for inspiration….

The Most Beautiful Suicide

Whilst looking into the Empire State Building, I came across a photograph by photography student Robert Wiles, which has been described as an image of "the most beautiful suicide". On 1^st May 1947, a 23 year old woman left her fiancée and chose to commit suicide by throwing herself off of the Empire State Building. She left a note with her things left on the observatory deck "he is much better off without me ... I wouldn't make a good wife for anybody,' ... Then she crossed it out before jumping.  In her determination to end her life she leaped clear of the set backs and landed on a United Nations Limousine parked at the curb. Wiles was on the street that it happened on and got this photo minutes after her death. I find the photo strangely memorising. It’s odd to think that something so horrific and sad as ending ones life in such a violent way could somehow result in something that looks so peaceful, so calming, almost beautiful….

Empire State Of Mind

The photographs of Lewis Hine never fail to amaze me no matter how many times I see them. Hine would use his camera as a tool for social reform and in particular focus on mans contribution to industry. He was commissioned by the National Child Labour Committee to document child labour in industry in America and the resulting photographs were instrumental in the changing of child labour laws. I think it amazing that photographs can not only have this amount of influence and power to change a law that has been in place for so many years but to change the way people think about the issues as well.

In the 1930s Hine was commissioned to document the construction of the Empire State Building, these pictures fascinate me. The workers would work up there with no harnesses, no safety precautions whatsoever, Hine endured the same dangerous conditions to get the best vantage points of the workers. The majority of the workers were immigrants from Europe and would undoubtedly be getting paid peanuts considering the work that they were doing. The construction started in March 1930 and ended May 1931, and the statistic that I’ve found for the death count of construction workers is five, which, if it’s true, I find quite surprisingly low. Having been up the Empire State Building myself, I find it quite incredible that these workers could have worked at such heights. I don’t suffer from any fear of heights, at least not anything that’s caused any set backs for me, but I remember standing on the 86^th floor looking over the side and suddenly feeling a strange sense of vertigo, my knees were shaking and I had a sick feeling in my stomach. I take my hat off to the brave workers who risked their lives.

I remember seeing this photograph years ago, probably as a kid, and not thinking a lot of it. It is an image constantly reproduced and shown and some people have even bought it on canvas from high street shops and hung it on their wall. It had no effect for me because I presumed it to be fake, I figured the men in the image must have been digitally put in that setting because in my mind "no one would be that high up, sat like that without any safety harnesses". I was obviously pretty naive because when I found out that the image was real I was suddenly fascinated by it, it makes me feel a little sick just looking at it. Although it was not taken by Hine, it was taken by Charles Clyde Ebbets, you see that same theme as is running in Hine's images.

Show me your peacock

I want to start experimenting more with make-up in my shoots. I should use hair and make-up artists a lot more than I do currently, especially while i'm at Uni and there are so many other students available to collaborate with. We recently had a cosmetics brief at Uni where we had to create an advertising campaign for, I chose The Body Shop, but throughout my research for the project I saw a lot of make up adverts that really caught my eye. For example this MAC advert, using peacock feathers to mimic the colours of the make-up range. It's a really good metaphor as well as Peacocks use their feathers to attract a mate and show off. This is just like how the make-up will be used, in theory to make the wearer more attractive to the opposite sex. The colours and the way it has been applied in spontaneous strokes looks really striking and beautiful.

I would like to create a fashion image inspired by this but I would possibly like to use parrot feathers instead, as parrots also attract mates with their colours. I am also thinking of using fireworks as a metaphor for the colours of make-up. When I create these images I want to have the model's make up done similar to the make up in these images.

Gosh advert

Kylie Monogue

The body beautiful?

 Watching Lauren Greenfield's film "Thin" (see previous post) has got me thinking about the way in which bodies are altered in the media to give a false impression of perfection. Distortion and digital alteration of the body in our culture today has been criticised by many as setting impossible ideals for women and setting unrealistic expectations for men and is accused of being the cause of health problems such as eating disorders. You can see in Greenfield's photographs the influence of the media and photographs of celebrities on young girls growing up. One example would be the photograph of a four-year-old girl called Allegra (seen in figure 1.), laying on her bed with a microphone in hand, back arched in a S-shaped pose, similar to that of pop stars and even of glamour models in the media.  The child is trying to copy the positioning and posing of women’s bodies that she has seen in magazines, bodies that are represented to her as “desirable” and “sexy”. Look at the example of Allegra compared with this glamour photo of Katie Price (figure 2.) and see the similar pose, laying down with back arched, legs bent in, looking far off as though unaware they are being watched, she has clearly tried to copy this type of photo.

figure 1

figure 2

In another of Greenfield’s photos from the series “thin”, she presents us with an anorexic teenager (figure 4.). The girl has been asked to draw an outline of herself on the wall to show how she perceives her body size. They have then drawn her actual body size in different coloured pen, which is much smaller and less bulky than the first. The comparison of the two outlines shows how the girl’s perception of herself is distorted. But I have wondered, why would it be so bad if the girl were her perceived size, would it make her any less of a person, or any less beautiful, why have we become so conditioned to believe that a body that is “fat” or slightly more overweight than the norm is a bad thing? At periods throughout history being overweight was seen as beautiful because it was a sign of wealth, prosperity, fertility and an ability to survive in hard times. For example this photo by Julien Vallou de Villeneuve from 1853 (figure 3.) shows a much more voluminous woman in contrast to this underweight, more recent one, of Kate Moss by Mario Testino (figure 4.). 

figure 4

figure 3

Through my research I have found that in today’s culture, a woman who is overweight may be read as a sign that she is rebelling against the male gaze by going against the set standards of beauty. It also signifies the woman’s independence to consume for her own enjoyment and not just to exist as an object for the viewing pleasure of others, in other words she is rebelling against the gaze. Thus, Former new journalist and writer Kathleen Rowe argues that fat, in this instance female, is hated in part because “it signifies a disturbing unresponsiveness to social control”. Encouraged through the medium of digital imaging, women are put under pressure from the idea of the gaze and the pressure to conform to an idealised body and search out for ways to conform to this.

"It's all I want, to be thin. And if dying is what it takes to get there....so be it" Alisa (patient at Renfrew treatment centre)

Lauren Greenfield is one of my favorite documentary photographers because of her ability to get under the skin of her subjects. Her book Girl Culture is full of photos showing what it's like to be a pre-teen/teenage girl growing up in Western Culture, the battles both physically and mentally that you go through to try and find acceptance for your body and who you are, not only from others but from yourself. Her photos show how media overload and our over saturated culture has affected girls growing up and distorted their vision of what it is to be "a woman". 

A series of Greenfield's that I find particularly moving is "Thin",  a collection of photographs and a documentary film that she made when she spent six months staying in a treatment centre in Florida for people with eating disorders. During her time there she got unrestricted access to therapy sessions, weigh ins, mealtimes, everything. The images are very intimate and examine the relationships that the patients build with each other, with the staff and with themselves, you can really see the pain and desperation in their faces. By being there for six months Greenfield would have gained the trust of everybody in the community and they may have even accepted her as part of the furniture, forgetting that she was there, allowing her to have more access to the true goings on, as opposed to what people put on as a front when they are very aware that a camera is watching. Greenfield has said that she made the series to show "what it's like to have an eating disorder." I think this is impossible to do due to the complexities of an illness such as anorexia, without being in that state for mind I think it would be very difficult to imagine how the patients are feeling. However I think Greenfield's work gets the viewer as close as possible to understanding them and what they're going through, it's very moving and you feel a real empathy for the people in it. The fact that one of the main women featured in the film committed suicide a couple of years ago after falling back into anorexia makes it all the more haunting to watch.

This promotional video shows a brief insight into life at the treatment centre and Greenfield talks about why she did the project