Closeups, Identity, Objectification
Some people have asked me whether I think that closeups are objectifying or something, because they obscure and fragment identity. This threw me off a bit, because I didn’t feel like I was objectifying. I felt like I was appreciating people in an even deeper way than most photographers. It is an intimate relationship.
I argue that closeups don’t obscure identity any more than any other method of depiction. There is always a frame, always a cropping of reality. And this kind of cropping, the extreme closeup, is just appealing to me. As for the nudity, I don’t care for clothes that much. Who cares about clothes when you’ve got this endless jungle of hairs and curves and pores and crevices and stuff?
Showing someone naked and without their face doesn’t automatically objectify them. It’s not that simple. You can show profound appreciation for a living being in this way, and not be objectifying. Conversely, you could easily photograph someone in full dress from head to toe and still objectify them, for sure.
So whatever.
The Female Gaze statement 2/2
My personal artist statement for the gallery show:
The photographic camera and the watchful public eye have subjected the female body to their gaze countless times. I have certainly felt my own body exposed to many. Often, that gaze is unwanted, even violating, and it taints the way I am perceived.I use my work to reclaim my body. I reclaim the use of the camera, and reappropriate the female in the most aggressive and honest way I can, in the way that I see fit. I flood the frame with flesh, till it oozes with obscene color. All parts of the body – the worshipped, the ignored, the mundane, and the loathed – are enlarged considerably on my prints, confronting the viewer. They are me, they are female, and they are at once beautiful, repulsive, and erotic.
The Female Gaze statement 1/2
Group statement I wrote for the Female Gaze show:
We are four female photographers, each responding to our gendered culture. We use our cameras to examine, control, and express our worlds. Our gaze is multifaceted, complex. It can be curious, aggressive, strange, critical, hidden, or something else entirely. We may be subject, object, and/or voyeur. What we share is the desire to explore the female experience and infer from it an understanding of our lives.
homosexual questions uncovered!
Below is a comment I posted in response to the “Homosexual Questions Uncovered” videos by “ex-gay” christian group, Passion For Christ Movement.
Disclaimer: I don’t believe in any god. However, I do respect others’ beliefs so long as they don’t somehow encroach on my life. I also accept that to attempt to disprove God’s existence to christians is a waste of time. The comment below speaks as if I am accepting the existence of the christian God, for the sake of argument I suppose.
Okay. I have no interest in attempting to prove or disprove the entire Bible. The Bible says MANY things! Some true, some untrue. I’d just like you to open your minds and understand things from another perspective.- Just because multiple biblical books reference one another and hold some of the same implications doesn’t prove their validity. Harry Potter books can be found throughout the world as well, and resemble one another, but they are fiction regardless.
- You may believe statements in the Bible to be the word of God, but they were written by human beings. And as we all know, human beings make mistakes. Furthermore, the Bible has been translated, abridged, translated, abridged, over and over throughout centuries. The Bibles you find in the book store are NOT the real Bible. For the real thing, you will need to find the original Hebrew, Aramaic, or Greek texts, which probably no longer exist even. If you are reading any translation or abridged version you for sure are reading the words of a person and not God. They are not pure. If you believe them, you are trusting in each and every transcriber along the way. Keep in mind that you have never met these individuals and do not know whether they are liars or sinners or what. Additionally, you must trust that all these texts are what they say they are. You must trust that their publishers and any historians who reference them are truthful as well. That’s a lot of trust! You may call it trust in God, but really it is trust in every single person involved.
- Why do you think that God’s thoughts are frozen in time? Even if the Bible is the pure word of God, don’t you think he still has the ability to speak today? Is God dead?
- It may be an unsettling feeling not having easy guidance from a supposedly all-knowing book. I understand that life is more difficult when you have to make your own choices, but following fallacy just isn’t right.
- Now suppose we do go ahead and trust every transcriber and translator and publisher and retailer along the way. Suppose we ignore the times that the Bible does not make complete sense to us, and seems to contradict itself. Suppose we put faith in the claims that the book in our hands is in fact the word of God, the omniscient creator and ruler of all. Suppose we believe that God’s words from so many years ago are static, and that He no longer has anything new and relevant to say. Can you really say that you are approaching life with an open mind and open heart? Do you really think this is what God wants?
passenger pigeons
People are so stupid.
Anyway:
…In netting passenger pigeons the trappers would blind the decoy birds or “stool pigeons” by sewing their eyes shut with a fine needle and silk thread. The decoys were then fastened by their feet to the stool, which has a circular piece of board six or eight inches in diameter, fastened to a stick four or five feet long, the opposite end of which was placed in a slot in a stake, thus forming a hinge so that the bird could be raised and lowered by pulling a string running to the fowler’s hiding place.
Col. Shoemaker says: “By raising the bird and dropping it suddenly it was made to flutter as it was going down; and the flying birds, seeing it, would begin to circle around, coming nearer and nearer, until they finally lit on the bed around the stool pigeon. Then the net would be sprung. At once there would be a mass of fluttering, struggling pigeons, with heads protruding through the meshes. The fowler and his assistants would rush to the massacre, which was the crushing of the head of each individual bird between the thumb and forefinger.”
Well anyway they are extinct now. Good job, jerks.
the body is a corporeal machine
an excerpt from my essay on Japanese Art and the Body:
What is most curious to me is the extent to which not only Japanese culture, but all modern culture imbues the human body with various meanings. Why is there such a tremendous reluctance to break free of these extraneous cultural connotations, instead of letting the body be the corporeal machine it is? Why not embrace biological reality over these moralizations and intellectualizations? This is what I intend to address in my own artwork; By reappropriating the human body as biological animal, and stripping it of all its clothing (literally and metaphorically), I attempt to display it in the most realistic way imaginable. I believe this to be the new view of the body for the future.
bodily functions and carnal desires
new artist statement:
We humans are in fact living organisms. We bleed and breathe, breed and grow. We are mammals, animals, our bodies built of skin, blood, and bones. With a camera, I flood the frame with naked flesh, till it oozes with obscene color. I seek to cast a new light on the body at a nearly microscopic level, with all its pores, blemishes, veins, and crevices. I take these small pieces that are often either loathed or ignored and enlarge them considerably, unabashedly confronting the viewer. The sight of it all awakens our entire sensorium, touching us somatically. Our bodies pulse along with the image. We are beautiful, repulsive, and erotic all at once.
Many of us forget our primal vitality, and see our own bodies as foreign and unusual. Our culture urges us to hide, even eliminate evidence of our animalism. Our bodily functions are regarded as private and indecent, our carnal desires as immature and distasteful. We seem to fear their power and are often at odds with them.
This inhibiting world is far too dry and civilized for me. Within it, I feel strange and alone, and often fall prey to the miserable grayness of it all. I need to aggressively reconnect with the beautiful and living to thrive. Seeking out these images, discovering the human body, rediscovering my own body, and displaying it all with pride restores my sanity.
feels to me like it needs an ending. not sure.
biology
a brief statement to accompany my recent photography:
This body of work is part of an ongoing investigation of life. Up close, living beings have a certain intensity that I just can’t feel from a distance. The veins bulge, the crevices ooze, everything rises and falls, and circulation pulses through everywhere. We are beautiful, repulsive, and erotic all at once. When I look away, I find a world that is far too dry, contained, and civilized, in which we are rarely conscious of our vitality. I want to find hard proof that life does exist.