Girl on Girl

Today, 21st January 2021, Charlotte Jansen visited my university virtually to talk to us about her practice and her book Girl on Girl. Jansen is the author of Girl on Girl and has been studying the female gaze, but she is also a journalist that writes about photography as an art form and photography as a social construct. She explained the “female gaze” (sexist imagery that tends to depict women in conventional ways which hide and/or expose their identity) and smaller movements through history that kept the movement going. In some ways the “female gaze“ is not without its flaws, but it is a progressive movement, some may say it’s feminist and in a way, it is, but it’s also so much more.

The 1970s was an era of photography where the body was reimagined and was ambushed by radical images of the body, which applied across the arts and culture and in different cultures too. Though most images at the time were deemed controversial and problematic, an example being Cindy Sherman’s series Bus riders - for obvious reasons such as black face - demonstrating the genre was not without its flaws, but also it was dangerously powerful for women to have control over themselves - Susan Sontag.

Today, the female gaze is more mainstream thanks to the feminist movement but also due to social media platforms like Instagram. The design of the front facing camera in 2010 and the commercialization of the female gaze within photography was used for the first time ever in mainstream media. There is also a movement of women interested in women’s subjects and photo-based artist like Petra Collins began using the term and populized it.

One of the things that really stuck with me, well two things really, was a quote by John Berger, Ways of Seeing, 1972 “Men look at women. Women watch themselves being looked at.” Being a woman myself and knowing that this is true, it makes me uncomfortable, demonstrating that men are in control and it’s a man’s world, which leads me onto the second thing Charlotte had said and that was for us women to be a community but also be the change that you want to see.

Jansen’s talk was so intriguing that I had to check out her book and look out for her next publication, may be you should too, her book can be found in many bookstores but also on Amazon.

[image from: Girl on Girl, Charlotte Jansen 2017]