Framing Landscape Photography 8. The Ghosts of Documentary 9. Robert Mapplethorpe: Whitewashed and Polished Body Double Rights Back to Top.
Awards Back to Top. Additional Information Back to Top. Publicity material Bk Cover Image Full. Also Viewed. On Being Included. Reckoning with Slavery. The Queer Art of Failure. Atmospheres of Violence. The psychic space of vision — the domain of the scopic — is itself informed by sexual drives voyeurism, exhibitionism and fetishism all hinge on the agency of the look.
What then is the effect of such an image on the woman spectator, who presumably cannot lose what she never had? The difficulty in formulating an answer to such a question is not specific to this particular photograph in which the iconography and organization literally reproduces a metaphoric configuration and materially presents what is typically displaced, sublimated, or repressed.
As a female spectator, my own reading of such images consequently hinges on the recognition of their overdetermination, which like strategies of mimicry, signals a gap or distance in the very act of reiteration.
But this is not to be confused with parody of with a related strategy of masquerade. It would seem reasonable to assume that these blocking operations function differently for male and female spectators, insofar as we ascribe sexual difference in looking. Consistent with her literalizing strategies that make manifest the latent dynamics of fetishism, Woodman renders the forms of this association explicit. A suite of images, no.
The familiarity and ubiquity of the conceptual collapse of woman into nature is here effectively bracketed, stalled, even short-circuited through the subtle suggestion of the nightmare facet of metamorphosis. We women refuse this relationship. Spectators are thus automatically differentiated and distinguished through the mode of address that constructs a feminine us and a masculine them.
Instead, Woodman relentlessly offers up the archetypal allusions, mythologies, emblems, and symbols adhering to the feminine, and infuses them — charges them — with dread, with dis-ease. Ridden with menace, its lapidary beauty and elegance serve to function as a kind of lure. Nowhere is this clearer than in the numerous series that enact tableaux of entrapment, engulfment, or absorption of the woman in those spaces — both literal and metaphorical — to which she is conventionally relegated.
In the Space2 sequence Providence, c. Here, the reified condition of the feminine as aestheticized object is made utterly explicit, as are the stakes. Variations on this theme include one in which the case contains an animal skull, another in which the corpse-like body of the model spills out of a Natural History display cabinet filled with stuffed specimens, birds, a racoon.
It is perhaps the House series Providence, c. In photographs such as nos. Swallowed by the fireplace, layered over by the wallpaper, effaced, occulted, Woodman presents herself as the living sacrifice to the domus.
The marking of this body in patriarchal culture, its incarnation as sign, is given a chilling embodiment when Woodman marks it in ways that conjure the impulse to debase and violate which parallels the impulse to worship and adore.
If the House photographs function on the register of nightmare, the astonishing blueprint works are conceived in the less charged modality of the oneiric. Here as always, the image of woman is central insofar as it is her body that becomes the dictionary of form to which all others are metaphorically or metonymically linked.
In one of these works, however, the figure of the woman is abolished, although the presence of masculine and feminine signifiers is nonetheless established. The triptych to which I refer, the 14 foot long Bridges and Tiaras is somewhat exceptional in the sense that it is constructed of existing representations; a schematic rendering of an 18th century bridge design, a filigree-work tiara, and a modern bridge.
The three images, enlarged to the same grandiose scale, visually assert a condition of equivalence. Thus the decorative ornament, quintessence of the feminine, is both the center image of the triptych, but more crucially, is presented in such a way as to insist on its equal importance.
Nonetheless, throughout her work there surface occasional explorations of sexual ambiguity or indeterminacy. This is manifest in suites of her images where sexual codes collide, where the boundaries and certainties of sexual difference are placed in unresolved play.
Get the latest news, reviews, and commentary delivered directly to your inbox. Become a Member ». Solomon-Godeau, an emeritus professor of art history at the University of California Santa Barbara and a former Guggenheim Fellow, laments the marginalization of feminist theory in art criticism.
This mystique is bolstered by the perception discredited by critics cited in the book, such as a photographer and lecturer at Northwestern University, Pamela Bannos that Maier had no technical training, to engender a myth of elusive genius.
One might argue that Solomon-Godeau underplays the role of context that Sontag came to stress in her later works. More persuasive are analyses that posit genres such as landscape painting and photography, street photography, and nude as historical processes.
But here lies the fundamental importance of her work. On Photography provoked considerable controversy when it was first published, nowhere more so than among the ranks of photographers especially art photographers. Such bold and authoritative pronouncements are difficult for the scholar or specialist to match, as experts are apt to be more knowledgeable about and comfortable with the photographic trees than the photographic forest.
They are never cited, but much of what Sontag writes is entirely consistent and compatible with their arguments. Always keenly attuned to the seismological tremors of the zeitgeist, Sontag began her considerations of the medium in the early s, when photography again became discursively visible, making it an object of critical and theoretical investigation.
The recognition of photography as something requiring critical analysis was evident during its first decade of existence, when the task was to try and understand what it was , what it did, how it should be thought of. It was another seventy or eighty years before photography as technology, medium, machine, apparatus, etc.
Undoubtedly, it was her work on the subject that helped defamiliarize what had long been so ubiquitous as to be effectively invisible. In other words, Sontag understood that it was the ubiquity of photography both as a cultural practice and as an atmospheric surround that required address, rather than any one of the specific photographic practices that were its tributaries.
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