Thinking about the persona project...

Victorian Women

1920s Women

Louise Brooks

Clara Bow

Billie Dove

Barbara Stanwyck

1950s Women

Sophia Loren

Liz Taylor

Audrey Hepburn

When I think of persona, one of the first things that comes to mind is a persona that nearly everyone adopts and presents in their daily lives: gender. Gender is extremely performative. When we think of gender, many of us have archetypes, stereotypes of things that are supposedly feminine or masculine- we have been taught to categorize so much into each side of this binary. Names, speech, careers, behaviors, films, music, body, physical presentation- we have ideas for all of these things in regards to what is male and what is female. One of the most obvious ways in which gender is performed is through the way we present ourselves physically, our clothes, our costume. A person's clothes, so the nameless "they" might tell us, cannot only tell us if they are female or male, but what type of man or woman they are. This plays a huge role in stereotyping. As a woman, I am constantly inundated with images defining femininity-images that don't necessarily allow for all aspects of my personality to coexist. These have become more fluid in the past few decades, but there are still gender norms and clear violations of these norms. It is as if we must choose which part of ourselves we want to present to the world each day as we dress. I wanted to explore these stereotypes of women, particularly in times when they were less fluid, and how they were manifested in fashion and the prescribed wardrobes of the times.

Images Defining Our Time

9-11-2001

War in Iraq

Abu Ghraib

2004 Tsunami

Hurricane Katrina

High gas prices/ financial crisis

Global Warming

2008 -President-elect Barack Obama

Project 2- Emulation

For this project I chose to emulate Julia Margaret Cameron (1815-1879), the early British portrait photographer. Cameron photographed many famous poets and scientists of the day, but the majority of her work focused on portraits of Victorian women. Cameron’s photos often made use of literary, classical, or religious themes. She used selective focus, accentuating certain details and allowing others to remain unfocused. To achieve this look I used both studio light and natural light, very shallow depth of field (through a wide aperture), and a relatively long exposure time. I emulated the soft, hazy look of the images by placing a stocking over the lens during printing.

Project 1- Mapping

When I think about mapping and what it is “to map”, I think of the act of imposing artificial borders onto a landscape. These borders can work with the landscape, or be totally imposed. The act of creating such boundaries in a landscape forces us to see the landscape in terms of these borders and the names and categories we give to them. Conversely, we also come to see the boundaries and the confined spaces they create in terms of the natural landscapes that become part of them. As I contemplated this idea, I thought of the way landscape and space are reflected in windows and doors of buildings. I began to think of the windows as the imposed boundaries of a map, the interiors of the buildings as the space created by the boundaries, and the reflections in the glass as the landscape, framed by and seen in terms of the borders of the windows. The buildings and the reflections, or borders and landscapes of mapped space, provide context for one another, and each shapes our perception of the other.
*Note: the stripes on some of the images are from light leaks in my camera.

Some Images...

Courtney Andrews

Nicko Straniero

Aura photos

Favorite Oberlin Photo Blogs

http://jessicamonnerat.blogspot.com/

http://theorangefedora.blogspot.com/

http://beforead.blogspot.com/

#7- some recent images...

I have been seeing a lot of photos and images performance/protest art dealing with some of the current economic and other issues, so I thought I would put them up here...

New York
Jakarta
Wall Street
wild fires in California
New York Stock Exchange

Britain

and, I just couldn't resist putting this one up...