These Breasts are Getting Some Attention

So, my piece about Femen, the Ukranian ‘topless’ protest group, has been up for a couple of months now. And you know what, hits on my blog have shot up. This strikes me as an interesting parallel to Femen’s own method of presentation and protest: using their bodies to draw attention to injustice and gender inequality. When I wrote my piece, and put Herbaut’s portrait of activist, Alexandra Shevchenko, at the top of the page, I was trying to make a useful analysis of the image, reflecting on whether the exposure of the female body can help or hinder a cause. Strangely enough, I wasn’t thinking about internet search hits – but that’s what I got. Loads of them over the last Quarter – along the lines of:

• naked amazons (38)
• naked women protesters (7)
• naked woman breasts (4)
• playing breasts (4) [Not sure what playing breasts would look like? I'm imagining one breast throwing a ball to the other... no?]
• femen girls (3) [Something about the term 'girls' makes this search particularly creepy and makes me think the searcher(s) missed out on what Femen stand for - womanhood, strength.]
• real women undressing game (3)
• super hot naked women showing exposed tits (3) [I quite like the tautology of this one.]
• female breasts are bigger than ever (2) [Are they indeed?]
• woman stripped naked and bound (2) 
• photo of nude breasts on body of young female (2) [Particularly strange - 'young female'? - almost as if women are a different species. Also like that the breasts are specifically 'on the body', you know, just in case you get pics of ones that have fallen off...?]
• man grabbing woman’s breast (4)
• beach voyeur woman naked (2)
• arab woman covered naked (2)
• egypt girls naked breast (2)
• half exposed breast clothes (2)
• female dominant breasts (2)
• exquisite breasts (2)
• erotic women body (2)
• naked tribal women (2)
• tattooed female bodies naked (2)
• breasts photography (2)

Well, you get the idea, they go on for ages… many many more, all orientated around the words ‘naked’ and ‘breasts’ and some of them mentioning race or the term ‘tribal’. Although each of these terms aren’t representing that many visits, it’s the sheer number of variations – each one constituting about a couple of hits – that surprised me. Obviously, I have been naive about the power of breasts on the internet.

So, to all those people (and here I’m gonna go with mostly heterosexaul men – shoot me down if you seriously think I’m wrong) – to all those guys who just typed in ‘breast’ and ‘exposed’ and whatever racial / physical profile you fancied taking an ogle at today I want to say a big: HELLO THERE! And to let you know, there are some thoughts about breasts, bodies and women on this blog so please have a read. Unfortunately for you, I have to also tell you, that this is not a porn site.

I’m not someone who believes pornography should be censored – I don’t think it’s intrinsically ‘wrong’. I think there’s some pretty bad imbalances of power within the dominant industry and I find it altogether unappealing and some of it thoroughly disturbing. Culturally; I have big problems, morally; no. But that is for another time, I just want to point out that I find it kind of sad and amusing that these are the hits landing up on the shores of my blog.

All those guys who just rocked up here with a couple of breasts in mind, I would like to ask you, do you read anything on here? Do you just get to the picture of Schevchenko and stop scrolling? I ask because I think it might be an interesting test. As Femen hope to make people aware of injustice and the discrimination women face by exposing their torsos – and indeed they have received a lot of coverage for it – I want to know if their picture on my site communicated any greater message than ‘breasts!’ (or as one searcher quaintly put it, ‘naked boobies’) ? It strikes me as a parallel and related case to Femen’s own position. It also strikes me that images are so much beyond any given person’s control that it seems unlikely that Herbaut’s portrait has reliably conveyed Femen’s message to the world. I’m sure it exists, well detached from context, in many corners of the internet. Even with the context I have provided, it seems that plenty of people are discovering the image without the desire to discover what it might be about.

I don’t claim to have answers to this problem. I would just like to say, that the exposure of the female body is a knife-edge that cuts between power and submission. I don’t know if anyone, at this cultural moment, can fully reverse the symbolism that surrounds the female body and names its exposure as vulnerable, weak and obscene. I expect that very few of the people looking for breasts on my blog scrolled down the page and read anything about Femen and what they stand for and why I think they are subversive. I still think it’s important to try to reverse this limiting symbolism though. I still think that maybe one odd person might have read a little bit about something they weren’t looking for after they hit ‘boobs’ into the search bar. Call me a dreamer, but I don’t see that we’ll get a chance at reshaping images around sex, femaleness and power if we give up on trying to start a conversation with the average male, heterosexual porn consumer.

So, I look forward to welcoming more of them onto my site now that I’ve got all the key search terms up on the front page.

Image Search Hit for ‘non-topless woman’.

Naked Courage: WPP and The New Amazons [Cross-post]

This photo is bound to grab attention, as breasts often do, and FEMEN protesters are clearly playing to that dynamic. However, this photo provides more of a complex presentation of the exposed female torso and one that proves interesting when considering the wider politics of the relentless sexualisation of female bodies whether they be veiled, exposed or neither.

When female breasts are so commonly fetishised in public imagery in ways that seek out the titillation of exposure – in Britain for example, tabloid paper, The Sun, prints a topless woman on page 3 every day- can any one act of protest actually hope to subvert the misogyny and objectification inherent in such an ‘exposure’?

Here’s how Shevchenko and by proxy, Herbaut, attempt to do so:

• The Stance:  Shevchenko’s pose, with the raised fist, speaks of her mission to teach women to be more assertive.  Shevchenko’s pose, with the raised fist, speaks of her mission to teach women to be more assertive. The figure of the ‘Amazonian’ is a central reference FEMEN utilizes. If the identification is to the “other,” suggesting the marginalization these women feel, it also points to ‘Amazonians,’ in the cultural imagination, as a matriarchal tribe made up of fearsome and fearless women. On the other hand, is it a case of gender politics being careless with racial stereotypes and identification?

• The Tattoo:  The garland of roses tattooed onto Shevchenko’s side, which depict the headdress she is wearing, act as the perfect sign for the paradox that this act of nudity as protest embodies. The tattoo is both a sign of bodily harm – being an inked in scar – and of strength, or resistance to pain. It shows the way in which her cause is so essential to her it is mapped onto her body and also the way in which her body is her cause. It’s an act done by someone with a clear idea that the visual presentation of her own body is key to her message.

• The Headdress: Of course the headdress is a reference to the tribal and Amazonian identification. It also hints at the theatrical nature of protest, the way in which the protester takes on a special public identity and performs choreographed acts. This garland of roses, and the brightly coloured ribbons, also suggest femininity, something which the group are keen to use and display rather than deny as some feminist groups in the past have done. It’s the turning around of signs – femininity is seen to equal weakness and vulnerability, but here Shevchenko and FEMEN demand that it equal strength. What could be the crown of a beauty queen is willed to equal the headdress of a tribal warrior.

• The Location: Herbaut’s choice of location does much to illustrate the group’s context. Shevchenko is depicted in open grassland on the edge of what seems to be a cluster of Soviet style apartment blocks. This speaks of marginalisation as well as the groups Ukrainian and urban environment. The grassy field upon which Shevchenko stands is another clever double symbol representing as it does both marginalisation and the open space of pastoral freedom which is also indicated by the flowered headdress. It reveals a dream of an Eden, a renewed innocence directed at and by the female body, which at the same time is drawn out of a full awareness of what that body means to mainstream culture and how it is exploited.

What this portrait tells us is that much of the time image makers and image consumers view the female body as either exposed or hidden and this is a hot topic (I mean, see all the worry over the fact that the woman in the Winning photo is wearing a burkha). Whether veiled or on display, it becomes clear that these two opposites in fact put the female body within the same continuum as something inescapably defined by sexuality in a way that male bodies are not. (It is worth remembering that if a man walked down the street topless he would not get arrested, and neither would he attract much extra attention at a protest). With this doubly innocent and knowing revelation of the female torso, I think Shevchenko is asking us to realise that the female body is also at times neither exposed nor hidden – it is the human form and as such represents identity, physicality and power.

Whether every audience can be sophisticated enough to understand the turning around of signs; the ways in which ‘weak’ is made ‘powerful’, ‘victim’ is made ‘fighter’, is a difficult matter. FEMEN certainly consider it a risk worth taking in order to finally draw attention to the problems women face in their society. This photograph as a photographic object must undergo the same difficult process of interpretation – is it a kind of pornography or a protest item that has raised the awareness of FEMEN’s cause? It is highly reliant on context. But in a world where the female body is so often used by others, especially through visual media, it is a statement that the members of FEMEN demand to be able to use their own bodies as tools of visual representation to further the cause of women’s equality and welfare. A body to protect a body is a courageous act.

This article originally published on BagNews where it was edited and adapted for the site > Here.

Also, regarding this topic it is well worth checking out Karrin  Anderson’s piece for BagNews : Photo of Woman Stripped by Egyptian Military: Not Shamed, Not a Victim 

In Defence of This Year’s World Press Photo: An Image that is Complex and Conflicting.

Already the World Press Photo of the Year 2012 is causing controversy. Critics are upset with the use of the Pietà. Not only are they saying, “Not again”, they are also noting that Christian imagery is being forced upon Arabic & Isalmic content. And so they should.

But I think there’s more to it than that. Of course, the Pietà is there, of course it causes problems, but what about the other narratives and styles the photograph contains? There is something more unusual about the image. It has a different sensibility to the Renaissance style that people are claiming it to have.

                                                                                                                                                                       First of all, the Christian imagery may be a clash with the content, but it doesn’t drag with it the rest of the baggage you would associate with religified images of suffering. The bare style, the off-centred framing of the pair: they stop this suffering becoming glorious or romantic. There’s something loose about it. This makes it stand out against other pieta-based images like this .

                                                                                                                                                                      To add to this contrast, the aesthetic does not strike me as Renaissance. It seems modernist. It has a dreamlike, surreal quality that speaks of an inner psychology rupturing through to the surface. The faces, swallowed by darkness, the strangeness of the white-gloved hands, the muscular shapes of the jaw and arms: all add to an aesthetic that is more current and more interesting. The angles and shadows are almost cubist. It reminds me of a Francis Bacon portrait in it’s twisting expressiveness.

                                                                                                                                                                  So what does the image tell us about the news story to which it pertains – which, at its widest, is the Arab Spring? First of all, this is clearly a personal image for a wider political context. The personal can often be reductive. Critics are anxious about the stereotypical presentation of the ‘Arab Woman’ – burkha clad, offering comfort to the man. The tension of this stereotype is there. This is indeed not a shot of the ways in which women engaged in and drove the revolution on the ground. On the other hand, the woman looks strong, her grip is fierce. She defines the man’s body. He is an exposed body, she is a force. This is an unusual dynamic and one which makes powerful the woman. Her grip conveys much about the bonds that tie people together and must be essential in retaining an identity in the middle of turmoil, trauma and revolution.

                                                                                                                                                                             So is this slice of the personal reductive? I don’t think so. It’s an insight, a gripping and gripped moment. The body is political ground, and I do not think it is distressing or inaccurate to see these bodies as symbols of a wider national struggle. They have not become dislocated in ways that are glorifying or mystifying. These bodies mean something both about a presented moment and a wider movement and they do so in a conflicting and complex way. Not all is resolved about the identities of the figures but much is communicated. For me, this is an image that conjures up the struggles of gender and of the revolution. The caring role appears not as weak or passive: it is vital and powerful, but all is a sinuous strain on a bodily level and a societal level.

                                                                                                                                                                       When we can recognise that the caring role does not have to be the secondary position, we can see that this image says more than the typical.

                                                                                                                                                                       Of course I am not talking here of the politics of Photography Competitions, or what qualifies an images as ‘better’ than all the other images. I would merely like to say that this image has relevance and power, and that although on the first level it could be said to fall into stereotypes and willed Western prejudices, I think there are more subtle levels upon which to view this image.  To see the other side of the argument, you can read this excellent piece . It’s worth considering all sides, and I am still intrigued to learn and think more.

                                                                                                                                                              Update: You can see some of my ideas and some other interesting points in this conversational piece on BagNews.

Abject Poverty / Object Poverty

Presenting poverty is difficult, as is presenting suffering in general. To expose someone to the lens, and then to the wider world, in a moment of struggle or pain or fear, must be justified by some purpose, some greater act of goodness. Otherwise it is simply a kind of voyeurism – a static piece of rubber-necking. I think this is a well-recognised problem that all photojournalist with any claim to integrity must struggle with – so I don’t expect to break any ground by bringing it up right here. No, this piece is simply to offer a neat little example – a coincidental chain of images – which made me think about the problems of showing poverty and which also throws up some other knotty little issues that turn out to be pretty big fat major issues that run within the practise and concept of documentary photography.

Don McCullin, Jean, Whitechapel, London, c 1980

Last week I went to see Don McCullin’s retrospective at Tate Britain. It’s a muted and interesting display occupying only one room (I’m told the McCullin exhibit at the Imperial War Museum is more impressive). I found myself struggling with McCullin’s images of homeless people and remarked to my friends that I believed these portraits had to be viewed with some nod towards historical context. By this I meant that I suspected these portraits were something more remarkable at the time of their production (60s – 80s) than in 2012. To be clear, I mean the fact of their existence was more remarkable, rather than the aesthetic of the image. The aesthetic is still incredible: eyes stare or defer, skin is rendered in smoky greys, coats and shadows are as heavy and black as charcoal on a canvas. But treating the dispossessed with a painter’s reverence must’ve been a bigger statement then than it might be now. I’m not saying it’s right that social issues should be reduced to fighting out whether or not their image has become cliché – but I am saying that it does, sadly, happen.  The fact that a pressing social issue can become ‘cliché’ is a disturbing problem and one which artists interested in social change must inevitably grapple with and seek out new strategies against.

Don McCullin, Homeless Irishman, Spitalfields, London 1969

I think the cliché is probably born of three sets of circumstance: that of the socially concerned photographer, that of the homeless person, and the bitter fact that homelessness is a problem that is ongoing and needs ever renewed address. The photographer’s desire to deal with the issues of poverty in his/her vicinity coupled with the accessibility of people who have nowhere else to go and who therefore continually offer their image, seems to make it quite likely that ‘the homeless’ will become a subject for the concerned photographer. Throw in the draw of some loose change being handed over in return for a snap and the potential for the image to be made is even greater. It is the economic imbalance, the fact that one person has private space and can protect his/her visibility and that the other has very limited access to private space and protection of his/her visibility, that worries me and makes me think that deeper problems might sometimes underlie the small social event of photographer photographing homeless person.

The other thing that made me uncomfortable was that these photos made feel useless. I did not understand why I was being asked to consume them as objects on a gallery wall. Were these art objects or a campaign? Both? Or maybe, evidence of a past campaign that now takes on the form of art? Or perhaps, evidence of McCullin himself, of his actions within the world, of his type of photography? The narrative these pictures propose are troubling to me – am I learning about McCullin (who afterall, is the subject of the exhibition), am I learning about these homeless people (who may be long dead, or totally altered from the image on the wall), am I learning about homelessness in general?  In any case, what can I hope to achieve as witness to their suffering? Suffering which is at least thirty years out of date. It’s a funny bind because the fact that these images figure a past makes me think that this suffering is ancient and unchangeable. This encourages one to turn the images into an art object, a piece of imagery. But that suffering is still there, however old, and to dislocate the art of the image from the suffering of the person shown seems usurious and inhumane.  Indeed it comes down to this: Am I witnessing a social problem or am I consuming an image? And how reconcilable are these two cases?

All these questions and feelings resurfaced again a few days later when I saw this spread in The Guardian’s Weekend Magazine (of the 21^st of January):

A number of things struck me – first of all the attractiveness of the grid layout and the density of portraits across the two pages. I find this layout intriguing, it makes me want to study each image and draw comparisons between them.  The highly detailed and dense quality of each image is interesting as well, if a bit over-glossed – creases, eyelashes and scratches are all rendered with a metallic precision.  Then, I noticed that there were no captions, no stories for any or each of these faces. At first this intrigued me even more – I began to ask questions of the faces, I began to worry about their histories, I began to notice the difference between them. But then I also began to wonder where the stories were and whether it was fair to present these faces, especially in such an aesthetically pleasing way, if the complex issues that lay behind each person’s predicament were excluded.

On one hand, I welcomed this as a new strategy: it got me interested; it got me asking myself questions. On the other hand that line of questioning ended in me wondering what the purpose or intended effect of putting these images in a weekend magazine without their stories was. There is a hint of idealisation about it, of romantic storytelling: “…they are also beautiful. A woman with exquisite cheekbones; an elderly man who resembles a medieval sage…”. I find too much romanticism unhelpful to social causes.  Once we enter a romantic narrative we also broach the reasons and feelings that motivate us to continue writing the narrative.  It was this sentence especially that I found most excluding and difficult: “…their weathered skin and intense gazes tell of the hardship of life on the streets perhaps better than the subjects could themselves.”. The face becomes a visual object to tell a tale, rather than the first presentation of a whole and complex human being with a whole and complex story. I think these faces do tell us a lot, but is it enough for a project that seeks to develop an intimacy with homeless people and to break down the everyday barriers that allow us to walk on by, to then reduce that story only to the face? I might be closer to the face of another than I have been before, but I’m also being asked to take that image, and that person, at ‘face-value’ and this erects a new kind of barrier.

Coda

My thoughts here were very much developed in response to The Guardian’s presentation of the images. It is interesting to see Time’s presentation of the same images on their LightBox site: http://lightbox.time.com/2012/01/26/portraits-of-the-homeless-by-lee-jeffries/#1

In fact, on LightBox, some of my worries and questions were answered. The explanation of Jeffries’ practice and the fact that he has used his work to raise funds for the homeless helps to make the status of these images a bit more clear. Also, the photographs on LightBox have captions – only location and date – but it makes a big difference to the meaning of the image. It makes this person locatable and historical thereby giving them a context which illustrates their situation in social terms. Jeffries says: “I’m stepping into their world. Everyone else walks by like the homeless are invisible. I’m stepping through the fear, in the hope that people will realize these people are just like me and you.” Of course, art cannot always be measured by what the artist claims it to be, however this does reaffirm my initial feeling towards the images – that they attempt a kind of intimacy that subverts the non-homeless person’s average interaction with the homeless person.

Well, this goes to show how much an editorial can construct, construe and influence meaning.

This piece now on the Duckrabbit blog here.

Images of Sexual Violence (1): Saying Things Kept Silent, Showing Things Kept Hidden.

This article is the first in a series about images of Sexual Violence in photography, photojournalism, documentary and visual art. My own piece, You Did This To Yourself (http://you-did-this-to-yourself.tumblr.com/) figures a response to the issues and examples I raise here.  

Toni Morrison’s The Bluest Eye is a story about a young black girl in 1960s America who is sexually abused by her father. It’s beautifully written and painful to read – speaking fearlessly about the realities of poverty, race and gender. It unearths the causes of victimhood and the silence which surrounds and supports the on-going occurrence of sexual violence. How to word something that is kept silent? How to show something that is kept hidden? Morrison writes:

“The novelty, I thought, would be in having this story of female violation revealed from the vantage point of the victims or could-be-victims of rape – the persons no one inquired of (certainly not in 1965); the girls themselves. And since the victim does not have the vocabulary to understand the violence or its context, gullible, vulnerable girlfriends, looking back as the knowing adults they pretended to be in the beginning, would have to do that for her, and would have to fill those silences with their own reflective lives. Thus, the opening provides the stroke that announces something more than a secret shared, but a silence broken, a void filled, an unspeakable thing spoken at last.”

Two things strike me as important here and may prove important in regards to other stories of sexual violence in other mediums:

1. That bringing words and images to the unspoken and unseen event is a kind of healing and overcoming. Morrison says that with the realising of the story of sexual abuse ‘a void is filled’, a need is met. Similarly, the silence appears as a kind of menacing spell, a thing to be ‘broken’. The relief provided by this break is clear in ‘spoken at last’ – this has been something needed and anticipated for a long time.
2. That the victim herself does not necessarily have the words: ‘the victim does not have the vocabulary to understand the violence or its context’. This is not to say, the victim is incapable of ever having the vocabulary, but rather her position as victim is defined by not having the words or a voice to speak against what is happening to her.

This makes it clear that to fight against the creation of victims of sexual violence, words and images must be given to those victims with which they can begin to address and describe their suffering and those who cause it. As it will become clear, these words and images are hard to provide or develop in a culture which still struggles to see the complex, various and ubiquitous nature of sexual violence.

In light of this, and to draw our attention to photojournalism, Ariella Azoulay’s essay, “Has Anyone Ever Seen a Photograph of Rape?” sets out an argument for the sheer lack of imagery of sexual violence in the canon of iconic photojournalism (1). Azoulay argues, whilst photographers have brought into the public arena images of many kinds of suffering – genocide, mutilation, violent warfare etc. – images of rape, an act which occurs in much the same context as the other atrocities, are largely absent. This labelling of the blind-spot proves to reveal not only that photographers have mostly failed at documenting rape when it occurs amongst other atrocities (typically during wartime), but their techniques of documenting rape during peacetime are also highly restricted and restricting. This blind-spot, in Azoulay’s analysis, goes on to be seen not just as an historical failure to vision, but also an ongoing inability to envision, born of the inadequacy of social discourses which still cannot recognise the reality of rape.

Azoulay’s questions are then, Why is it we cannot ‘show’ rape in the way that we can show other kinds of torture and bodily suffering? Hint: this might say more about the viewer than the actual event itself. And also – In what ways do these lack of images damage those who might need them – i.e. victims, potential victims and the wider society?

These questions will be explored later. As a first example, ‘Project Unbreakable‘ by Grace Brown is an interesting place to start:

It attempts to do the same thing that Morrison does with her novel, to fill ‘the void’ of silence and bring words and imagery to that which has been kept un-worded and hidden. People who have suffered abuse hold up the words of their abusers, words that were used to silence them. It is one simple gesture of resistance, of refuting the silence that has been put upon them. The phrases are short but they provide a small window into the complex world of abuse and sexual violence. That opening image, ‘I love you’, is especially powerful because it marks the importance of context and the complicated nature of abuse. They signal the way in which abuse can be non-violent – something that must be recognised if these cases are going to reach justice. They also indicate what the victim must struggle with: What if abuse is presented as love? What if you don’t know enough about love to be able to say this abuse is not love? That is certainly the case for Pecola, the abused girl in Morrison’s novel.

Perhaps the technique is a familiar one – photographs of people holding up signs with their personal stories or position on has been used in many other contexts and protests – but here is takes on a special resonance because these are words that have been characterised by the fact that they occur in private. Their power has been because of secrecy, because the abuser persuaded the abusee to never tell, because the abuser invoked shame and fear in the abusee. These signs are an act of placing the shame back on the abuser, of making the public witness what goes on in private. It is one simple way to take the words and turn them around.

The images also make clear, in case there could ever be any doubt, that choosing what to show – the very act of representation – is a fiercely political act. The format and style of that act of showing can make or break the message. These truths are especially raw in the context of a little seen and little understood phenomena which needs vision and recognition in order to overcome its occurrence.

This piece now on the Duckrabbit blog here.

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You can read more about Brown’s project here: http://www.guardian.co.uk/lifeandstyle/2012/jan/22/project-unbreakable

You can see the ongoing tumblr blog of Brown’s project here: http://projectunbreakable.tumblr.com/

(1) See : Azoulay, A.  The Civil Contract of Photography, 2008, New York: Zone Books.