'The
camera doesn't rape, or even possess, though it may presume, intrude, trespass,
distort, exploit, and, at the farthest reach of metaphor, assassinate - all
activities that, unlike the sexual push and shove, can be conducted from a distance,
and with some detachment' (1979. P.13)
In
this quote Susan Sontag highlights the ways that a camera’s gaze can disturb
and dismantle a subject. This quote is more concerned with the sexual gaze a
camera lens can posses but its demeaning quality can cross into the areas of
non-sexual exploitation. By this I mean the ways it can take a person, section
of society or country and open it up to a suggested scrutiny.
John
Berger says how during and after the initial use of the camera as a ‘gadget for
the elite, photography was being uses for police filing… documentation, family
albums’ (1980 ,P. 52). Sontag called it a valuable tool for plain documentation
because pictures have the inherent ‘presumption that something exists, or did
exist’ (1979. P.5). This is the camera’s indexical quality.
The
early colonial photographs at the time were mostly indexical in their intent
and mode of documenting the subjects appearance and existence. It was with the
developments of the camera in conjunction with the British colonisation and
exploration of Africa and other lands that the photographing of exotic artefacts
from oversees became ‘inconvertible proof’ (1979. P.5) that they actually exist.
All
manner of animals: jaguars, lions, rhino’s, elephants were subjects which were
of great interest to the explorers and with photographs people back in Britain
could see the wonders of these foreign lands. This was accompanied by
anthropological records and studies of native people of these areas. By
appropriation of a group of people through photography we get a knowledge from
them in our studies whilst also maintaining the metaphorical possession over
them through archiving. Sontag describes this:
‘To
photograph is to appropriate the thing photographed. It means putting oneself
into a certain relation to the world that feels like knowledge – and therefore,
like power.’ (1979 P.4)
The
presentation of humans in photographs followed how animals were depicted
because of the way they were shown as almost other species to us. The non-west
was represented as beasts of intrigue due to them looking different and otherworldly
to the coloniser’s eyes, this being mainly due to their skin tone. Berger says
how often the study of these peoples coincided with their enslavement or death,
a photo being a proof that these people did once exist.
‘Anthropological
records (often, as with the Indians in the United States, accompanied by
genocide)’ (1980. P.52)
The
photograph beneath (Westfield and co. 1870) is from an exhibition called ‘The
Colonial Eye’ of two Indians from an Indigenous tribe. They are mounted if you
will on a stump of a tree and bear the piercings, hairstyle and accessories of
their tribe. It is of course posed and it appears the photo was taken in a
studio however it is mostly indexical in its approach with an underlying anthropological
presentation.
Figure
1
These
pictures evolved into the taking of photographs of a symbolic nature as
archetypes of the colonized people formulated. A once purely indexical,
scientific approach to their photographic study of humans from these lands evolved
into symbolic representations of natives contorted into the image of savages.
Africans were symbolised as barbaric creatures with emphasized grotesque
gestures and these imperialistic tropes dominated the screens in films such as ‘King
Kong’(1933).
It
was the wests motives to manipulate the image of non-westerns as gross uneducated
beasts. This was achieved as soon as derogatory symbols of these people were
mistaken as realistic indexical representations or icons of the colonized
people. It is very hard for an icon or a symbol to go back to becoming purely
indexical but if a country is overexposed to racist iconography then the lines
begin to blur between truthful representation and tyrannical motifs.
Many
innocent photo’s of the natives became iconic but this was naturally and over
time. As the subjects identity gets increasingly distant with time they become
more like historical artefacts with limited referents. The difference between
photo’s with a big referents to the subject and photo’s without is that
overtime the latter becomes broader in its relevance to a group of people
whilst the former becomes almost holy. It is the fabricated racial tropes that seem
to linger in our cultural context and this is because our collective memory is
manufactured by the ideologies of the symbolic in conjunction with the shared
political motives of our culture at the time. Our society today still has an
embedded collective memory which harks back to the colonialist times.
Through
the symbolic representations of the non-westerners racist iconography was
cemented to a plethora of races. Icons like blackface, the watermelon and the Golliwog
was racist iconography of Africans. By doing this the west established its
coloniser identity by belittling other cultures. These icons are referred to
even today subtly by artists and photographers to the naivety of the viewer.
Iconography
like this isn’t just restricted to one medium and features across a dichotomy
of mediums advertising being big one. Complex magazine writes how Alex Wek the
Sudanese supermodel writes in her memoir ‘My life from Sudanese refugee to international
supermodel’:
‘all the images of black people that have been used in
marketing over the decades. There was the big-lipped jungle-dweller on the
blackamoor ceramic mugs sold in the '40s; the golliwog badges given away with
jam; Little Black Sambo, who decorated the walls of an American restaurant
chain in the 1960s; and Uncle Ben, whose apparently benign image still sells
rice." (People Magazine, 2012)
It’s
at a stage now where non-white artists who are trying to make a point about
racism by mocking these icons. Take a recent installation from an Afro-Swedish
artist called Makode of a cake presented at a birthday of the Swedish Artists
Organization. It features the artist Makode’s head pointing out of the torso
shaped cake blacked up in the style of a Golliwog. The culture minister cut the
cake as the artist screamed with people surrounding her laughing believing she
was participating in a campaign against Genital Mutilation in Africa. In actual
fact it was a clever way that the artist could expose that Sweden’s care about
Genital Mutilation in Africa is a lot for their own morality and doesn’t run
parallel to their understanding about racism.
Often
images appear which reinforce racial tropes to the ignorance of the viewer and
the subject. Often these tropes are embedded so far through our collective
memory that they lose their vulgarity. They into our subconscious cultural
context so that we are unaware of the links current photo’s make to them. A
good example of this is in a ‘Paper’ recent magazine cover shot of Kim
Kardashian (Paper, 2014). The photo shows her in a black leather dress with a highly
sexualised position and symbolising a sexual act. Her posterior is curved out and
she is holding a bottle of champagne which is spurting out over her head and
into a glass balanced on her buttocks. At face value it is clear that this image
is highly audacious in its sexual representation of the female form on a cover
of a magazine. Some deem it too licentious whilst others see it as a
celebration of women’s sexuality.
Figure
2
The
image is a direct copy of the photographer Jean Paul Goades earlier work. Interestingly
in the original the model is much darker, naked and has a subservient, comical
smile akin to the iconic slave girl look. Kim on the other hand is dressed in
lavish clothing with pearls around her neck and is depicted as luxurious unlike
the original cartoonish and naked presentation of grace jones. Is this Jean
Paul Goudes attempt at juxtaposing black and non-black women as different? In
the book ‘Jungle fever’ Goades includes shots of his girlfriend at the time
Grace Jones in lewd sexual poses. He exotified and objectified the image of the
black women, this being the point of his work, he says in an interview with
people magazine ‘blacks are the premise of my work… I have jungle fever’ (Wolhfert.
1979).
Figure
3
His
self proclaimed fetishism of the black form is an echo of infatuated of
colonizers with exotic ladies from Africa in the 1800’s. In a media criticising
blog called ‘Reading The Pictures’ they write that his work fetishizes ‘the
black feminine form as animalistic and as ‘other’’ (2013). This is reminiscent
of how the African Sarah Bartmaan a famous freak show anomaly was treated as a
sideshow animal in the 1800’s. Sold over from Africa in her 20’s she was put on
show in front of an audience scantily clad for everyone to see. Even after her
death she was dismembered and continued to be displayed until the 1970’s.
Figure
4
The icon of the hypersexualised Black Jezebel is an archetype
used in entertainment industry today as well. Many people in the entertainment
industry even work with the icons to be successful because they understand the poignancy
of them in our society.
Bellow
is one of Jean Paul Goades dehumanising ‘jungle fever’ photographs of Grace
Jones in a cage bearing her teeth in a position reminiscent of a lion or monkey.
Behind the cage on a curtain is the shadow of a tail, Jean Paul Goades presents
her as a caged animal trying to symbolise the link between her and exotic,
violent beasts circus animals. She is presented as a wild and uncivilised
animal who you should ‘not feed’ as the sign reads. The backdrop is a curtain
and a showman’s hand posed as to be asking what the animal has to say to the
viewer. Of course this liberty in speech is false because if she is what the
presentation suggests an animal then all we can expect is screeching and
roaring.
Figure
5
Fashion
photography has provided us with pictures dehumanising Africans and Asians. Fanon
writes that at the core of post-colonialism is the denial of ‘all attributes of
humanity’ (1963. P.250) of the colonised people. Besides turning them into
animals the fashion industry does this by turning them into props to a set. Lets
take this image of an Australian Vogue fashion shoot featuring a model Isabel
Lucas in a tribesman style dress posed next to some African tribesmen. We are
dehumanising them by making them props for the blonde white model, mere
furniture to the scene.
Figure
6
This
is treating the Tribesman, that’s what these people are in this picture:
artefacts to the west, symbols of Africa reinforced into our consciousness by photography,
films and books such as ‘Zulu’ (1964) or ‘The Heart of Darkness’(1899). The
fashion industry is heavily racist in the way it also favours whites for its
shoots and when it does use blacks it seems only to be in the context of the
African queen dressed in leopard or tribal pattern clothes.
I
see it as a ripple effect, a novel with people in it adhering to racist
post-colonial expectations may inspire a film or an art work and then a film
may inspire the codes present in a fashion shoot whether it be the attire or
the pose. It is this constant copying in our culture which maintains the
viewpoint and the more the production is at a constant the less space there is
for someone to realise its negative connotation.
Beardswell
states that the postcolonial gaze ‘has the function of establishing the
subject/object relationship’ (2000. P.8). So therefore a photo would suggest a
relationship between the viewer and the subject and therefore the viewer would
gain an understanding of themselves in relation to the subject, therefore
establishing their identity. This is why we are so willing to keep this gaze
afloat. Our identity is so engrained in the post-colonial gaze that perhaps
subconsciously we are unwilling to lose this part of us. Whether consciously
imperialistic or subconsciously naïve we struggle with the idea of losing our
colonizer identity.
The
subservience to the West from non-whites presented in fashion photography is best
shown in photography of non-white women but this submissiveness is present
outside the post-colonial gaze. The male gaze is a term coined by feminist
critics to describe the way that the camera puts the viewer in the perspective
of a man. The camera holds a certain authority over the female subject, a
controlling presence due to its metaphorical and literal capture of you. Susan
Sontag links the acquiring of a picture to ‘a semblance of wisdom; as the act
of taking pictures is a semblance of appropriation, a semblance of rape.’ (1979.
P. 24)
If
a model is obliged to pose like the photographer says she should in that period
of time that it is taken albeit very short then she is under their control. Laura
Mulvey the critic who coined the term says:
‘In
a world ordered by sexual imbalance pleasure in looking has bee split between active/male
and passive/female’ (2013 .P.19)
It
is not only the photographer that has this power however as when the viewer of
the photograph is handed out to the public then they are given the gaze and
therefore the power. Schroeder suggests 'to gaze implies more than to look at -
it signifies a psychological relationship of power, in which the gazer is
superior to the object of the gaze' (Schroeder 1998, 208).
When
modelling for a shoot for a generic magazine or a film poster the model acts as
if the camera is a sexualised man’s eyes. She’s given directions on how to pose
but she doesn’t particularly need them due to this connotation being in her
cultural context. In our collective memory this is the norm and we’ve become
desensitized to hyper-sexualised photographs.
In
this fashion advertisement for Gucci the girl is in a submissive position on
the man’s lap, his hand is in the position as if he were to spank her. This is
pose where she is being controlled by him and to the viewer she looks compliant
to the male presence and therefore subservient as a sexual object to any male
viewing the picture.
Figure
7
The
fetishization of the female form by the way that it is presented mirrors the
post-colonial gazes dehumanization to the subject in the way that the viewers
perception is molded. Molding of the viewers perception in-turn changes their
outlook on the subject hence why photography proves as a dangerous political
tool aswell as an effective marketing strategy. Not only can these gazes change
our ideas of the subjects but also construct and reinforce tropes which can be
detrimental to the respect of the subject. The repeated exposure to these
archetypes create icons which can be identified within a seconds glance. What’s
even more dangerous is the way that these icons implant themselves within our
subconscious alongside their derogatory connotation.
Bibliography:
Sontag, S. (1979) On Photography. London: Penguin Group.
Berger, J. (1980) About looking. London: Bloomsbury Publishing
King Kong (1933) Directed by Merian C Cooper. RKO Radio Pictures
Wek, A. (2008) Alek. My life from a Sudanes supermodel to International Supermodel. Amistad Publishing
Wohlfert. L People Magazine. (1979)
Reading The Picture. (2013)
Beardsell, Peter (2000). Europe and Latin America: Returning the Gaze. Manchester, UK: Manchester University Press.
Fanon. F (2001). The Wretched of the Earth. London. Penguin Group
Zulu (1964) Directed by Cy Endfield. Paramount Pictures
Conrad J (1899) The Heart of Darkness. Dover Publications
Mulvey L (2013) Visual pleasure and narrative in cinema. Grin Verlag
Schroeder,
Jonathan E (1998): 'Consuming Representation: A Visual Approach to Consumer
Research'. In Barbara B Stern. Representing Consumers: Voices, Views and
Visions. London: Routledge
Paper
magazine. (2015)
Paul
Goude. J. (1982) Jungle Fever. Farrar Strouse and Giroux
Photographs:
Figure
1: Westfield and co. (1870) Fakihrs. (Online) Available at http://www.sleek-mag.com/special-features/2012/07/colonial-eye/
Figure
2: Jean Paul Goude for Paper Magazine (2015) break the internet (Online)
Available at http://www.papermag.com/no-filter-an-afternoon-with-kim-kardashian-1427450475.html
Figure
3: Paul Goude. J . (1982) Champaign incident from book ‘Jungle Fever’ (Online)
Available at http://i.dailymail.co.uk/i/pix/2014/11/12/1415758316525_Image_galleryImage__Muzzed_Jean_Paul_Goude_s.JPG
Figure
4: Heath. W (early 19th century) ‘Caricature of Sarah Baartman’
(Online) Available at https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Saartjie_Baartman#/media/File:A_Pair_of_Broad_Bottoms.jpg
Figure
5: Paul Goude. J (1982) Grace Jones caged from book ‘Jungle Fever’ (Online)
Available at http://static.thefrisky.com/uploads/2014/11/13/grace-jones-goude.jpg
Figure
6: Doyle. M (2011) Isabel Lucas for Vogue Australia (Online) Available at https://camiflage.files.wordpress.com/2011/12/isabel-lucas-vogue-australia-december-14.jpg
Figure
7: Testino. M (2006) GUCCI Tom Ford Ad campaign (Online) Available at https://s-media-cache-ak0.pinimg.com/736x/0a/7e/79/0a7e79146852cb4fd1f0d2412526f914.jpg
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