Neoteric Photography aims to explore photography in an age where the image is everywhere. The image has become prolific yet easily forgotten. Hoping to find something to hold onto, something that will survive longer that it takes for pixels to appear upon a screen.
I have now completed my project sign-off for my negotiated project. Below is one of the artist's works I will be discussing through my research; Jemima Stehli, Table 2. This work references the work of Allen Jones which can be seen below. Through this work I will look at the second to the fourth waves of feminism and discuss.
My own work has an element of performance and through analysing these works I hope to explore ideas of performance and photography in relation to a woman's body.
SMART Objective: Major Project Feminism & Photography
In my photographic project this term I will be creating an Image and Text book, this will be both digital and hard copy and will be created on Blurb. The concept of the book will be a feminist 'performance piece' that has been photographed to create a narrative, that celebrates women and art using boundaries and instructions. The images will be taken on my Olympus DSLR OMD MkII and I may also use polaroids. My target market for this work will be Generation X as I believe it will appeal to my own generation and will reference forms of feminism and photography that they will be aware of. I will complete this and upload to a gallery on my website by the beginning of December.
I have created a Milanote board to explain my ideas and my ideas for the research I will carry out for my proposed feminism and Photography project. By doing this I realised I was more interested in the idea of performance and using the text/image book like the artists; Schneemna, Ono, and Stehli to put forward a feminist perspective through the work I will produce.
Continuing on my theme of Feminism for the term I would like to do work about Feminism through photography.
This could take various forms - I could work with my own body as a woman, or I could work through objects and stories like Sophie Calle and her work Striptease where Calle worked as a Striptease artist and turned this into her artwork. 'Calle's oeuvre has flirted with these opposites: control and freedom, choice and compulsion, intimacy and distance.'(Jeffries, 2009) I like the idea of a small book and a narrative and like Calle and Yoko Ono following a set of instructions or using boundaries to create images.
I would like to consider instructions for photographs further and perhaps use existing ideas or stories that would work for my instructions for photographs. I do also enjoy photographic instruction manuals and This is also something I might like to play with as an idea for creating a photographic instruction manual.
This could be really good for the feminism and photography theme and this is definitely an idea to be explored further through research. I have many Photography books and manuals as I collect these so the source material here would be original and very useful.
I will consider all these ideas and I will add more when I feel I have decided on the idea I would like to pursue.
References
Jeffries, S. (2009) Sophie Calle: Stalker, stripper, sleeper, spy, The Guardian. Guardian News and Media. Available at: https://www.theguardian.com/artanddesign/2009/sep/23/sophie-calle (Accessed: October 20, 2022).
While creating my own advert I looked at other feminist campaigns and consider how they worked, how successful the message was and who the target market was. I began by looking at Emma Watson's Un Speech as what I wanted to convey was very much in line with the ideas that Watson is talking about in her speech.
Here Watson talks about the importance of men and boys being involved in change, she discusses the word 'feminism' and how unpopular this is and how women have turned away from this stating; 'my recent research has shown me that feminism has become an unpopular word. Women are choosing not to identify as feminists. Apparently, I’m among the ranks of women whose expressions are seen as too strong, too aggressive, isolating, and anti-men. Unattractive, even.' ( Cole L.N. 2020) This speech really does have the basis of good Feminism that if these values were embraced by both sexes perhaps real change could begin.
HeforShe is still going strong and their website has resources and action kits and ideas so that YOU can get involved and promote change. HeforShe website. The target audience is all men and all women, so we can really work together for gender equality.
Another campaign - 'This is what a Feminist Looks like' was high profile and the Fawcett Society & Elle the fashion Magazine promoted this campaign. 'The Fawcett Society's story begins with Millicent Fawcett, a suffragist and women's rights campaigner who made it her lifetime’s work to secure women the right to vote.' (FawcettSociety 2022) now it still continues and promotes women's rights across the globe. The campaign that we are discussing here - 'This is what a feminist looks like' (2014) started well with many male celebrities and politicians wearing T-shirts to promote feminism. Conscious Magazine stated; “This is What A Feminist Looks Like” shirts that you might have seen on the chests of some of the most in-demand men in Hollywood to raise awareness for this movement (in the guise of consumerism, of course, but we can save capitalist holidays/agendas for another time). In theory, the idea of getting influential men to spread the word about, and trying to normalize, feminism, sounds like a decent way to attract more men to join the cause'(Katebi, 2014) and it really did and it is a pity that teh fashion idustry acyauly brought thsi campaign with a bang as it was disciveered that teh T-shirts were being made by women in sweatshops in Mauritius for pennies an hour causing the men to withdraw from the campaign, all the profits from the T-shirts were going to promote women's rights and women's charities.
I have looked at these two campaigns as they were of the same mindset as my own, engage men and change could happen. Education, conversation and understanding will get us further and we should be trying to do this everyday and speak up when we see a woman being treated in a way that is not equal or fair.
We do need to keep going, we are now entering the 5th wave of feminism, what will it bring? What will we contribute to change?
References
HeforShe (2022) HeForShe. Available at: https://www.heforshe.org/en/champions (Accessed: October 16, 2022).
Nicki Lisa Cole, P.D. (2020) Full transcript of Emma Watson's 2014 speech on Gender Equality, ThoughtCo. ThoughtCo. Available at: https://www.thoughtco.com/transcript-of-emma-watsons-speech-on-gender-equality-3026200 (Accessed: October 16, 2022).
FawcettSociety (2022) The Fawcett Society. Available at: https://www.fawcettsociety.org.uk/ (Accessed: October 16, 2022).
Reporter, S. (2014) Nick Clegg: 'I wouldn't have worn pro-feminism T-shirt if I knew, Evening Standard. Available at: https://www.standard.co.uk/news/politics/nick-clegg-i-wouldn-t-have-worn-profeminism-tshirt-if-i-knew-where-it-was-made-9836819.html (Accessed: October 16, 2022).
Katebi, H. (2014) This is what a feminist looks like. The Feminist Shirt Controversy, Conscious Magazine. Available at: https://consciousmagazine.co/the-feminist-shirt-controversy/ (Accessed: October 16, 2022).
The advert here works quite well, I think the image is strong and the tagline works. The logo is more in keeping with the message I was trying to convey. The additional words could have been bolder and easier to read and here I think is the weakness of this advert. Also my son, who is Gen Z, stated that the advert was 'cringy and awful' this made me consider that the target audience for this advert would not be men of Gen Z, it perhaps is too feminine, it does not appeal to a younger audience and perhaps the target market for this would be millenials or Gen X. The idea here was to appeal to men and women and still I am not sure that it would do that...more work is definitely needed!
After practising in class on Pixlr, I wanted to create my final advert using Photoshop. I liked the design and the image however I wanted to improve on this and create a new logo.
I began by creating a new canvas on Photoshop, File, New and then in the dialog box I went to Print and A4.
I then opened the image I used originally in Photoshop, clicked on Select and select all in the top menu and then edit, copy and then went to my new canvas and clicked on edit, paste. The image was now on my canvas. I aligned this using Photoshop guidelines to ensure the image was centred correctly.
I then added Text by clicking on the 'T' in the tools menu on the left-hand side of my workspace. I added the words and then used the move tool in the tools menu to place it where I wanted it in the image. I then changed the font which was Lucida Bright, Demi Bold ay 48pts and adjusted the colour to the shade of brown/orange to match the image.
I then created a new logo I wanted to create something that represented the message much better than the original so I went with 'Humans for Change' as the idea was for men and women to unite and work together to create a better world for all. I created this on Tailor Brands again as this was a time constrained piece of work.
I then added the logo by exporting it as a png and uploading to Photoshop, I adjusted the size using the transform tools and I also lowered the opacity so that it stood out but did not just have a white background and that it integrated with the image.
Before I finished the advert I actaully wanted to make a T-Shirt with just the image, logo and tagline so I saved the image as a jpeg and then used T-Shirt transfer paper in my printed, on print setting I set this up and so it printed this in reverse to that it could then be ironed onto the T-shirt after printing and appear the correct way round. I asked my son to take a polaroid of me wearing the T-Shirt!
The idea here was to show the potential of the campaign and that this could be added to T-shirts that would be easily recognisiable.
Finally I added the rest of the wording to the actual advert so that those who were interested could get involved and join Humans for Change! I will add the final advert on the next post.
