The Others

Contextual Studies: Gender Equality Within Photography

Today we looked at gender equality and sexual stereotyping. We looked at a couple of female photographers, including Julia Margaret Cameron, Tina Modotti, Cindy Sherman and Sarah Lucas. The first photographer I looked at was Cindy Sherman.

Cindy Sherman is a renowned photographer and filmmaker best known for creating evocative self-portraits. Sherman’s photographs were central to the feminist art movement in the United States in the 1970s and contends that Sherman’s Untitled Film Stills, a series of self-portraits created from 1977-1980, can shed light on today’s photographic trends. Sixty-nine black and white photographs of the same size and shape, Untitled Film Stills is a series of self-portraits that feature Sherman in Hollywood-inspired settings. By photographing herself in recognizable positions and poses, Sherman’s Film Stills, raises questions about the lack of diversity of the women featured in mainstream images and the objectification of women’s bodies in film and photography. By by inserting her own image into mainstream visual culture, Sherman underlined the porosity of the border between self and representation.

I then researched a male, contemporary photographer, called Ben Hopper. Ben Hopper created a series of images called 'Natural Beauty. Narrowing in on one of the most stigmatized beauty standards for women,body hair, particularly armpit hair,Ben Hopper’s photographs consists of a diverse female roster who have all ditched the razor and gone totally natural.