So… after reading some articles in class yesterday and hearing about a tutor’s experience with a women in architecture hack-a-thon, I’m curious to know if I could organise one for women photographers.
This post is serving as little more than a bookmark to make me do something about it.
There’s two famous ladies in these photos. I’ll give you a hint – they ain’t alive anymore. The eagle-eyed will spot that both the Mona Lisa and the Venus de Milo are in the backgrounds of these photos – that is if you can see them through the cameras, phones and selfie sticks held aloft.
This is what the Mona Lisa room looked like from where she surveys the crowd:
I see just two people in that photograph actually looking at the painting in front of them. About US$780,000,000 worth of painting. By one of the greatest artists that has ever lived.
There’s a joke I’ve heard told a fair few times amongst art historians that you don’t visit the Mona Lisa to see the painting in person, you go to experience the crowds. And now you go to experience the phenomenon that is the selfie.
I mean I guess it’s not that odd, after all so many people will just be repeating the Beyonce/Kanye selfie that appeared last year some time.
And P. Diddy.
Nothing prepared me for the huge amounts of people in the crowds in front of the Mona Lisa and the Venus de Milo that had their backs to the work of art. And not just because they were turning round to let someone else have a look, but because they were trying to take a fucking selfie.
I think it was Roland Barthes who wrote an essay when he was alive (1915-1980) that discussed how photography had become like big game hunting. Amateur photographers developed this drive to photograph everything that they saw in order to take it home and show people. This was evident in the Tate’s Salt and Silver exhibition which in some places read like an album of ‘interesting shit I’ve seen’. If you’ve ever sat though ‘Jim and Bob’s trip to Cambodia’ at your local camera club, you’ll know exactly what I mean.
The idea of the photograph as trophy seems to have got stronger rather than died out as a concept. Barthes would be turning in his grave. The idea that it’s the cultural norm to photograph a famous artwork and then Facebook it to prove you are there rather than actually look at the damn thing is verging on… well… I don’t have a word for it. I want to say disturbing – that’s the closest I can get.
It’s the fact that people have to prove they are there with a photograph that is the problem for me. I carry a camera around galleries and I photograph artworks. I do this for a few reasons.
Reference shots. I often take a snap of the art work and another of it’s label (just in case I take the wrong label, or something, so that I have both for the future). Being an art history student means that I’m always working on my huge inner database of artworks and this helps me look things up later and read about them.
Interesting observations. Sometimes there’s something interesting about a sculpture or painting that I don’t want to forget. A small detail in the corner of the painting, a dress, or often something on the side or back of a sculpture that isn’t usually photographed and easily available on the internet or from the galleries website.
Material for essays. If I’m working on something specific, then gallery website pictures don’t always work out for me. Sometimes there’s an experience you want to get from seeing it in person and you need to try and convey in a photograph. Sometimes you want to photograph something other than the artwork itself – like when I wandered round MoMA in New York taking pictures of the installations and galleries themselves because I’m writing a project on how you would install a video game exhibition.
The Louvre – View from inside.
Nice compositions. Fundamentally I’m still a photographer. Sometimes an artwork just makes a nice composition, and riffing off of another artist’s work can be enjoyable. Like this shot of The Louve taken through one of it’s own windows. Sometimes artworks can be seen or experienced in new ways because of the location that they are now in or the light on that particular day or the other works that they have been paired with.
You know why I don’t take photographs? To prove I was there. Or for detailed looking at later. If you want to look at something closer later most galleries provide really good digital copies of their works. Sometimes you download them from the site itself, sometimes you have to register and they send them to you (like the British Museum). This is one area where the galleries and museums have generally embraced digital technology very well and do provide great resources for people who need to look at something a bit closer and in more detail. Google are also really championing this cause with the Google Art Project. And Wikipedia can often be a good source of imagery too, because works get pulled from their gallery pages and into a central repository. Like this digital copy of the Mona Lisa for example. If you click on it you’ll get a glorious 2834 x 4289 version to look at in depth. You can’t photograph this work as well as this from the crowds surrounding the painting while the gallery is open. You can’t. They won’t let you because you’d need a tripod etc and that’s now allowed in the gallery. There’s no point.
So what is the point? Literally the only reason to photograph such a famous painting as the Mona Lisa is to say ‘I was there’. But I think that says a fair bit about your friends, if they don’t believe you were there without seeing a photograph of you with the painting.
I’m assured that the Mona Lisa has always been busy since it’s display in The Louvre, that it’s always had similar volumes of crowds. But ten or twenty years ago they were looking at the work, not trophy hunting to prove that they were there.
So Sean Peacock / Shaun Colclough has been convicted of Sexual Assault and banned from ever taking a picture of a female model again without someone accompanying who knows of his convictions.
A quick summary of the background. In 1996, aged 22, he raped an 84 year old woman. During his sex offenders rehabilitation he was taught photography and discovered he was pretty good at it. He was very good at it actually, I certainly admired his work when I was starting. He began to intimidate models with sexual discussion, exposing himself to them and assaulting them. The actual details are elsewhere on the web, it’s kind of beside the point for this blog. The judge argued that his behaviour was an escalation because he had gone from a drunken rape to systematically planning to sexually assault these female models. Right on sister, etc.
But that’s not what I want to discuss here. I want to discuss the community reaction.
Violence. That was the initial reaction.
I keep my eye on lots of the amateur photography websites due to my job (hey, I write about photography professionally, in case you didn’t know). Even the websites I’ve been banned from for upsetting the managerial staff, I still keep an eye on those for what’s happening in the community. So when I saw last night that Roswell Ivory had posted about the conviction of Peacock / Colclough I had to stay up late for an extra couple of hours to keep an eye on the reaction.
Violence and rape. The first responses I saw. Some lovely photographers actually wrote down that they hoped he went to prison and got raped by other men. Male on male rape is a serious crime and if you know anyone who’d ever been affected by it then you’ll know that it’s one of the hardest things in the world to deal with. Why would we wish someone to be raped in return for committing any crime? That’s a horrific thing to say.
From PurplePort.com. Hilarious.
(Highlighting not my own – I just scrubbed out the usernames and avatars.)
These photographers are potentially a danger to any model that they work with. Why? Because they consider violence and rape to be a casual, trivial thing. Let’s hope that a model never upsets them and they decide that they deserve to be raped for their misdemeanour, because clearly they believe it’s a worthy punishment for some crimes. Which crimes do they think it’s a worthy punishment for? Who knows.
Discussing prison rape isn’t funny. Male on male rape isn’t funny. You know who else believes that rape is a suitable punishment for comes committed? Illegal kangaroo courts in rural India. Then even in this country there’s the violent drug dealers who think that rape is a suitable punishment.
So when these photographers joke about how they hope Peacock / Colclough gets raped in prison as a punishment for sexually assaulting female models, they’re associating their views with these people. I’m sure that they’re the first people to say that they didn’t mean in in that way, but honestly, is there really a good way to say that someone should be raped? Is there ever a time that saying someone should be raped is funny? Is male on male rape funny while male on female rape is serious? Are the men that made these comments a bunch of fucking homophobic bell ends? (The answer is yes, btw. They probably are.)
Male on male rape victims are considered weak and unmanly, which is why it’s considered a fitting punishment for criminals. Well, you know what? Male rape victims are anything but weak and unmanly and it’s about time we just stopped perpetuating this disgusting myth. Men get raped by other men. It’s every bit as awful as a woman getting raped. And we’d never say that a woman was weak for being raped, so why do we make that insinuation about men?
Then there’s the reaction of it being good to have that guy locked up because real photographers don’t do those things.
From an early blog post about Peacock / Colclough.
I’ve seen several instances across the web this morning, but this one seemed to sum it up best. Also some of the others I’ve seen have been on private Facebook pages and I’m not quite comfortable sharing those on my blog. Although this one was public:
From Facebook.
Well, sorry guys. Peacock / Colclough was a real photographer. A bloody good one at that. Let’s face it, he took better pictures than most amateurs (and many professionals) could manage. This term ‘real photographer’. I’ve seen it bandied about in the past. It seems to be used by guys who want to give naive young models a false sense of security about working with them. Me? A cynic? No, you’ve got the wrong person there.
And it’s not a shame he called himself a photographer. He was a bloody excellent photographer. What else should he have called himself? A man who owns a camera and take pictures of people?
It’s dangerous to start labelling people in these terms. If there is one thing for certain though, it’s often the people who use the term ‘real photographers’ that aren’t actually very good. So what makes a real photographer if it isn’t about taking good picture? To be honest, I have no idea, and I don’t really care. I’m sure I don’t fall into their definition of a ‘real’ photographer because I’m not politely taking pictures of T&A, but there you go.
So this… #NotAllPhotographers thing. Of course, I’ve not seen that term used but there are parallels to be drawn with the whole #NotAllMen thing that happened earlier this year.
Saying that not all photographers act this way is a slightly weird and extraordinarily infuriating defence. We know that not all photographers act this way. Those of us who work towards attempting to eradicate this sort of behaviour from our beloved industry and hobby aren’t stupid. Cases like this don’t need a devil’s advocate. They don’t need someone saying ‘he wasn’t a real photographer, real photographers don’t do this’. At worst it redirects the discussion away from the topic at hand and back to the fact that most photographers are well behaved. We don’t need to talk about how great lots of photographers are, we need to talk about how fucking awful a minority of them are.
People who complain about these guys not being ‘real photographers’ aren’t engaging with the subject at hand. They’re derailing the discussion and doing a bit of white-knighting in the process. Yes, they were real photographers. Lets not ignore the fact that they were photographers.
These people are not predators who own a camera, they are predators who are also photographers. Sometimes they do use photography to get what they want, but guess what, they’re still photographers. Removing these people from the community by basically saying ‘they’re not one of us’ is a problem. It means that we can’t deal with them. We can’t come up with strategies to root them out and figure out how to attempt to prevent this kind of thing happening in the future.
At it’s very worst, if these guys aren’t photographers… then why are young women going to their houses/studios and taking their clothes off for them? If these guys aren’t photographers, then the models that are assaulted by them are just strippers and suddenly you’ve made it a whole lot worse for the models to do something about it. Because if you think that the authorities don’t take models seriously, then strippers and escorts have a whole extra layer of difficulty.
I suspect that the low numbers of women practicing photography is very little to do with gadgetry and everything to do with culture and expectations.
In the 1850’s or so, photography was actually quite commonly a womans hobby. The reason being, that once rich women had birthed their husbands children and told the maid what to do for the day, she had very little to do with her time other than look wistfully out the window while attending to her needlecraft samplers. Clearly, some women wished for a more interesting and adventurous hobby. Cue photography. There are some photographic historians who believe that at least 50% of photographers in the early days of photography were women, but this is hard to demonstrate because so little of the material is actually recorded in any meaningful way. We can find shoeboxes of photographs at any flea market full of photographs, but very few have any identifiable information on them. Some of the early leading and prominent art photographers were women though, and a fair bit is known about them.
Over the decades that follow, it became more normal for even wealthy women to work. Families became less flush with the cash and dropped essential services such as maids and nannies. Women looked after the family, women did the household chores etc, more “upper class” families became considerably more “middle class”. This was particularly compounded by the Wars, which of course sent even more women out to work, because the men were away getting shot at, amongst other unpleasant things. When these men didn’t come home, the women obviously had to juggle working, rearing children and looking after the house – leaving very little free time for anything resembling a hobby.
As we went though the 1940’s and the 1950’s, there was an uncomfortable air of division between men and women. On the whole (at least my research shows) women often worked, ran the houses and looked after the children. You think this left spare time for fun? Men were free to take up their own pastimes. Photography was having a bit of a golden age at the time, with cameras coming down in cost and developing becoming much more accessible at time. Attitudes at the time too, were that science and art was something that was mans work, something a little lady couldn’t possibly get her head around. Why this change of ideas from the Victorian era and before? Who knows, but I’m researching it.
As my Grandmother puts it, the 40’s and 50’s were a “dark time” for many women. They struggled to find their own identify in a changing world. For women spending their formative years in this decade, a hobby is something that they generally didn’t have. Yes, there are exceptions to the rule, but pastimes were something best done when the housework was in bed and the children were asleep. How much photography can you really do while you’re checking on the kids every half an hour? On the contrary this was a time of clubs and societies for men. Photographic societies were booming again, populated largely by men looking to get out the house and spend time enjoying themselves.
You didn’t really start seeing more freedom and equality for women until you start looking at those born in the late 50’s onwards. Growing up through the 60’s and 70’s passed on values of equality between the sexes. These women still weren’t generally encouraged by their parents to live a free and independent lives. But crucially they were forming their own shared experiences as a generation, and they would pass those experiences onto the next generation.
My generation. Born in the 80’s. Encouraged as a child to have a go at anything you want. No longer are there social barriers to entry for so many hobbies. No longer are women expected to only take up hobbies that can be fitted around their own domestic life, because quite frankly most of us women don’t have a “domestic life”. We are no longer expected to marry, settle down and have kids before we hit our mid twenties. That gives us YEARS of time to figure out what we enjoy doing. Plus at school everything is taught equally – and that has only been in force in the last twenty years – if that! Boys are taught cooking and girls are taught woodwork. No one says that we as girls can’t do anything just because we were born with a vagina instead of a penis.
The world has wised up.
Amongst photographers my own age, I know considerably more female photographers than male photographers. At least a 75%/25% split. I only know two or three female photographers above the age of 35, compared with dozens of male photographers.
Plus of course, the cost of entry has been levelled. It has always been in the past, that women generally earned less than men. There is still a pay divide, but not on the same scale has it has been in the past. Plus as less women are choosing to have children, that means that women on the whole have more earning potential and more money. That means more money to buy the gadgets that we lust.
Society is changing considerably. We are the first generation of women that has truly found it’s voice – thanks to our parents. We are the first generation who can do anything we want to do, without feeling male dominance breathing down our neck.