Girl On Girl

Charlotte Jansen explores the power of the female gaze and looks at the new ways women are photographing themselves and each other.

There is an undeniable pleasure in looking at a beautiful photograph of a woman: it’s visceral, but that response tends to complicate the role women have in art and visual culture. In the past, photographs of women were made by men to pander to a heteronormative, male gaze. Photographs of women fed female competitiveness–ideal for selling products in a capitalist world–and did little to represent the many other experiences women’s bodies go through. In recent years, that’s started to change. Through my book Girl On Girl, I wanted to explore what was going on. 

Over the last ten years, more of the photographs of women we see on a daily basis are made by women. That’s partly because photographers don’t have to wait to be seen; thanks to the internet, they can create, publish, and present their work independently. The introduction of the front-facing camera to smartphones in 2010 helped explode this self-generating photography which has influenced what we are seeing, with more women turning their cameras on themselves and the women around them.

However, female visibility is, in a sense, still a fallacy: we see photographs of women every day, on the covers of magazines, on ads on the tube, plastered on billboards, in miniature on our devices, and in porn. But the message we get from this mass of images is pretty much the same. It is largely aspirational: women are beautiful, or they are rebellious (against the assumed default patriarchy). Sometimes–and this group is a more recent phenomenon, and rare–they’re shown as both. Even more rarely do they appear as neither. This last group is usually the kind of photographs women take.

Why does this matter? It matters because photography really affects how we see people. After years of seeing more of the images men wanted to see of women, we’re now getting a broader picture. The dominant public opinion today perceives how and why women photograph women – and what these photographs have to offer - very narrowly. I know this because before I started this book, I felt the same way.

Many of the photographers I interviewed for Girl On Girl have never described their own work as feminist: artists such as Jaimie Warren, Isabelle Wenzel, or Iiu Susiraja, for example, are using their bodies sculpturally, as form, something they can control totally, and something to have fun with. If you look at length, they reveal new nuances in the human shape; the way objects circumscribe identity, and how the human environment moulds us. I don’t doubt they’d all love for women to have an equal position in the world–and in their art, that world exists–but to only see their work as feminist would be too simplistic.

Among the forty women I interviewed for Girl on Girl, it was clear that when not labelled as feminist (as now something that is commercially viable), this kind of work has been relegated or dismissed as vapid or shallow.

This has been a particular problem for younger artists whose practice happens primarily online and includes selfies. Molly Soda, Monika Mogi, Mayan Toledano and Alexandra Marzella, all of whom feature in Girl on Girl, touched on this in our conversations. The significant difference now is that they have much more control over their work and how it’s seen. They command a huge reach, much bigger than most of their critics. They have a power that women photographers didn’t have in the 70s, the era of the most radical photography of women by women, or during the 80s and 90s when women made satirical, postmodern photography of themselves.

Women do photograph women differently. Speaking to women, I realised they feel a huge responsibility towards other women–the reason that many turn their lens on themselves instead. They see much more complexity in women than men do, and that comes out in the photographs. Artists such as Phebe Schmidt, or Maisie Cousins, working between art and advertising, are among the women photographers doing something I find really interesting in photography–creating images that are still aesthetic and seductive but can speak more truthfully about indulgence, gluttony, and vanity.

Since its early widespread use, photography has played a part in figuring out who we are, in investigating self-image. Increasingly, it’s become about fantasy, rather than reality, about creating a world we want to see, rather than depicting the one we live in–but finding a greater truth in the invented. The photographs women take of themselves and other women are changing what we see of women and how we see it, and slowly we’re catching up. If we cannot see more than an expression of feminism or femininity in a photograph of a female figure, how can we expect to see more than this when we encounter women elsewhere in our lives?

Through the process of writing Girl On Girl, I spent time talking to women from seventeen different countries, who came from all kinds of backgrounds, whose practices move from photojournalism to fashion and all the blurred areas between; artists of all ages and stages in life; the only thing they shared was a common subject of women in their work. What this highlights–for me, at least, and I hope it will for others too–is just how many possibilities there are in these photographs if we’re willing to look beyond the parameters we’re prescribed. As it turns out, what you get is not always what you see.

This feature originally appeared in Riposte #8.

 
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