Gender

Girl with Puppy Dog Eyes

After Photoshop: Manipulated Photography in the Digital Age

Over the past twenty years, photography has undergone a dramatic transformation. Mechanical cameras and silver-based film have been replaced by electronic image sensors and microchips…

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rania_matar_a_girl_and_her_room

A Girl and Her Room by Rania Matar

Rania Matar has produced an exhibition and a book of unique and subtle power. Focusing on contemporary young women from vastly differing cultures in the United States and Lebanon, her project, A Girl and Her Room, reveals the complex lives of her subjects in the unique setting of the girls’ own rooms.

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Carrie Mae Weems Afro Chic

Carrie Mae Weems: Three Decades of Photography and Video

Carrie Mae Weems is a socially motivated artist whose works invite contemplation on issues surrounding race, gender and class. Increasingly, she has broadened her view to include global struggles for equality and justice.

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Godrad's Masculin Femenin

Masculine Feminine by Jean-Luc Godard

With Masculin féminin, ruthless stylist and iconoclast Jean-Luc Godard introduces the world to “the children of Marx and Coca-Cola,” through a gang of restless youths engaged in hopeless love affairs with music, revolution, and each other.

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catehrine_opie_football_players

Catherine Opie’s: High School Football

Catherine Opie’s images of teenage football warriors and their battlefields – finds new life in its first showing in New York.

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Lynn Hershman Leeson

!Women Art Revolution

Women Art Revolution annotates the evolution of the Feminist Art Movement in the United States from the personal perspective of feminist artist and film director Lynn Hershman Leeson.

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Untitled-Film-Still-3

Cindy Sherman’s Retrospective At MOMA

Working as her own model for more than 30 years, Sherman has captured herself in a range of guises and personas which are at turns amusing and disturbing, distasteful and affecting.

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Political Contemporary Art From Iran

Ghadirian was inspired to make work reflecting what she saw as the duality and contradiction of life. Her Qajar Series (1998-2001) consists of small studio portraits of women dressed in the nineteenth-century Qajar style. Many of the women photographed are Ghadirian’s friends and family. The backgrounds of these portraits resemble those found in photographic studios of that period. However, the artist has added some modern anomalies or dissonances, such as a mountain bike, a newspaper, or a Pepsi-Cola can. Ghadirian plays with these juxtapositions and contrasts, thus expressing the difficulties women face in Iran today – torn between tradition and the modernity of globalization. These composed portraits depict women unsure to which era they belong.

Shadi Ghadirian qajar
Shadi Ghadirian
Qajar #42
2001, black & white digital prints, 60 x 90 cm.

Ghadirian made her Like Every Day Series after her marriage to fellow photographer, Peyman Hooshmand-zadeh. In this body of work, Ghadirian comments upon the daily repetitive routine to which many women find themselves consigned and by which many women are defined. Each of these color photographs depicts a figure draped in patterned fabric in place of the typical Iranian chador. However, instead of a face, each figure has a common household item such as an iron, a tea cup, a broom, a pot or a pan.

Her work is intimately linked to her identity as a Muslim woman living in Iran. Nonetheless, her art also deals with issues relevant to women living in other parts of the world. She questions the role of women in society and explores ideas of censorship, religion, modernity, and the status of women.

Shadi Ghadirian's "Nil Nil," 2008.

Shadi Ghadirian
“Nil Nil”
2008. Digital print, 30 x 30 in.

Amir Mobed

Amir Mobed
“Come Caress Me”
September 2010 performance at Azad Art Gallery, Tehran

Shocking performance at Art Gallery, inspired by Chris Burden, in which he stood in front of a target, wearing a bodysuit with a protective metal box over his head, and invited gallery visitors to shoot at him with a pellet gun. It was, he says, a symbolic execution with a message about freedom of speech and the hopes of artists of his generation being silenced.

Amir Mobed Come Caress Me

Amir Mobed
“Come Caress Me”
September 2010 performance at Azad Art Gallery, Tehran

Amitis Motevalli Portrait of the Artist as a Rebel
Amitis Motevalli
“Portrait of the Artist as a Rebel”
2005. Digital C-print, 20 x 13 1/2 in.

Anthony Goicolea’s Pre-adolescent Boys

Anthony Goicolea’s photographs of “pre-adolescent boys” question childhood & school-life with transgressive and erotic imagery. Goicolea himself portrays all of the boys in his photographs through the astute use of costumes, wigs, make-up, and post-production editing via the software Adobe Photoshop.

“You and What Army” I act out childhood incidents such as fight scenes, first kisses, and deranged play dates. These works are simultaneously rooted in nostalgia and science fiction.

 

Anthony Goicolea
You and What Army Series: Class Picture
1999

Many of the sets are constructed to depict suburban environments in which the cast of characters are seen undertakeing painfully awkward transformations as they undergo the journey from childhood to adulthood.

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Yasumasa Morimura: Requiem for the XX Century

The self-portraits by the Japanese artist Yasumasa Morimura, Requiem for the XX Century: Twilight of the Turbulent Gods, examines an array of historical figures and political events that have been significant in shaping the 20th century. Employing his usual methodology, Morimura uses costumes, make-up and props to create unconventional and bold renderings of iconic images from history.

While Morimura’s work has traditionally investigated femininity through iconic depictions of women from art history and popular culture, this body of work examines widely disseminated images of prominent masculine figures from the last century. Each protagonist or event is cast in a moment of apogee, when history is being made and visually captured. Substituting himself for ideologues, dictators or brilliant minds such as Einstein, Lenin, Che, Mao or Trotsky, Morimura reflects on his personal encounter of these images during his lifetime as well notions of masculinity embedded in politics and war. By re-contextualizing portraits and events into present day, Morimura offers a fresh look at these prominent men who, moved by wisdom, hate, ideology or idealism have carved a space in our collective psyche.

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Cindy Sherman’s Untitled Film Stills

Cindy Sherman’s Untitled Film Stills (1977–80) have been canonized as a hallmark of postmodernist art, which frequently utilized mass-media codes and techniques of representation in order to comment on contemporary society. In this series of 69 black-and-white photographs, Sherman posed herself in various melodramatic guises that recall the stereotypical feminine characters presented in 8 x 10 publicity stills for B-grade movies from the 1950s and 1960s. The personae she created range from ingenue lost in the big city to martini-wielding party girl to jilted lover to hausfrau. Untitled Film Still, #15 depicts the tough girl with a heart of gold.

Contrary to the media images they appropriate, which may require a transparent sense of realism to sell an illusion, Sherman’s stills have an artifice that is heightened by the often visible camera cord, slightly eccentric props, unusual camera angles, and by the fact that each image includes the artist, rather than a recognizable actress or model.

Cindy Sherman.
Untitled Film Still #7
1978.

In the early 1980s Sherman continued to explore stereotypes of femininity and female representation found in popular culture, such as the centerfold format of pornographic magazines. She also began to use color in her work; her painterly sensibility is apparent in Untitled, #112 and subsequent photographs. Untitled, #112 is also one of the first images in which the artist portrays a more masculine identity. This gender ambiguity, along with the way the unusually lit figure emerges from the black background, yields an unsettling sensation. These effects become ominous and even frightening in later works in which Sherman portrays more disheveled and malign characters.

Cindy Sherman
Untitled #209
1989

Untitled, #167 is from Sherman’s Disasters series, which directly investigates grotesque and disgusting subject matter. The sense of foreboding elicited by earlier works is more overt, suggesting the terror of horror films (a genre that significantly focuses on female victims). Untitled, #167 depicts the scene of a gruesome crime. Emerging from the dirt are the nose, lips, and red-painted fingertips of a blonde, apparently female, victim.

Cindy Sherman
Untitled #216
1989

A discarded Polaroid photographic sheath suggests documentation (either by a police officer or perhaps the villain, whose reflection appears in an open makeup compact), and obliquely implicates the artist as photographic voyeur. The very darkness of the image and the reflectiveness of the photograph’s surface make it difficult for the viewer to scrutinize the scene. Untitled, #167 foreshadows Sherman’s use of prosthetic body parts in her later works, as well as the gradual elimination of her own likeness.

Sherman’s reputation was established early on with her Untitled Film Stills, a series of black-and-white photographs from the late 1970s in which the artist depicted herself dressed in the guises of clichéd B-movie heroines. In photograph after photograph, Sherman was ever present, and yet never really there—her ready adaptation of a range of personae highlighting the masquerade of identity. Her appropriation of the space on both sides of the lens destabilized the traditional opposition between artist and model, object and subject—one that had been theorized by film critics in terms of spectatorship and its gendered codes of looking.

Cindy Sherman
Untitled #96
1981

If the Untitled Film Stills elicited debate concerning the construction of woman-as-image, the photographs Sherman made throughout the mid-1980s served to perpetuate this discourse. Her Centerfolds (1981) and Fashion (1983–84) series elaborated the codes of what film theorist Laura Mulvey termed the “to-be-looked-at-ness” of female representation. Emulating the signifiers of the centerfold, the closely cropped photographs reveal a body that is available to the camera and bathed in a vivid light. Sherman’s choice of subject compounds the voyeuristic impression established in the works.

Feeling pigeonholed by the feminist discourse that surrounded her work, Sherman gradually dispensed with representations of the female, often removing herself from the picture and moving toward more fantastic and lurid imagery, as in her Fairy Tales and Disasters series from the mid- to late 1980s. The ever-increasing market for her photographs also prompted this turn, challenging her to attempt to create work that was “unsaleable” due to its visceral depictions of vomit, body parts, and grotesque fairy tales. Simultaneously, she instilled the works with a heightened sense of artifice created by garish colors and gaps that reveal the fiction behind the illusion.

Art 21 Episode: Transformation

Watch Transformation on PBS. See more from ART:21.