last wednesday's class...

i showed prints last week in class.

i asked the class whether the prints just looked like Man Ray imitations, or if my goal of creating my own images that were simply inspired by his work was showing through. Austin felt that they just looked like imitations; he said this was partially due to the fact that the pose of the figure in the image i printed was so similar to Man Ray's Minotaur....


Minotaur is one of Man Ray's most famous images, published in the Minotaur magazine. of course i was aware of the similarity in poses; for all of the images i shot i had Man Ray's poses and abstractions of the body in mind...






when i was shooting i took long exposures with one hit of the strobe; i was thinking of what i did for the first assignment last semester;

i was "painting with light" using my body. i thought the same method would be a useful way to convey my visual idea of surrealism.
i thought perhaps that would visually separate my images from Man Ray's.



perhaps when i print another of the images i shot, the differences will be more evident.




one of the things i'm trying to do with this project is discover what defines my images. i want to see how i react to the inspirations of artists and movements of the past. so far it seems i am unsuccessful... but this is the first image i have printed.





another thing that was brought up in class was the fact that these are nude, female self portraits.
this relates directly to a quote i read in Aperture about Carrie Mae Weems' "Not Manet's Type"

(this is just one image from the piece, and only a portion of the text... i am unable to find the rest online, unfortunately)
"...She purposefully casts herself as the object of the male gaze, and then shapes scenarios that overturn that role. One could speculate that these masters' often distorted images of women reflect a fear of the feminine; if this is the case, then Weems takes that threat a step further. In this series the black womam's body is seductive but also willful and independent - and it is the female artist who is putting herself on display. Not Manet's Type explores the dilemma of the modern woman who wishes to be desired, yet not to be created in the image of a male-generated reality."
... which made me think of chapter 4 of Ways of Seeing (which, if you haven't read, come on. read it already), which was all about the female nude in art, how women are always being observed by men, and because of that we always see ourselves as we would be seen by others.
my response, so far, however, is that i don't know how i feel about that, or why i use myself in my images (my excuse has always been that i'm the best model i know... but that's just because i don't have to explain to myself what i want)

i was fortunate last Wednesday night to have Fatimah Tuggar in my expanded cinema practice class. when critiquing the video i showed, she brought up feminism (i would have to go in to too much detail about the video to explain what was going on, and this is already a long post, so we'll just leave it at "she brought up feminism"..) and told me that because i am a female artist, that fact will always be a part of critiques of my work.
And who am i to say that it doesn't have something to do with feminism? certainly i have been influenced by the world around me, and i AM female, and these ARE nude photographs of me, not only taken by a female artist but by me, of me.

just things to think about.



things suggested for me to look in to:
"Woman House"
Lucy Lippard
Cara Lee Sheeman
Sherri Lavine
(i think i have the spelling wrong on the last two)






that was a very long post, i hope you read it all, (or at least enjoyed the images,) thanks if you did.