photographic exhibitionism as self representation

Self representation through photography has been at the heart of my work. As as a photographer and as someone looking into the issues that photographic representation  raises. 

 The objectification by the camera,   within a power discourse, was something that I began to look at when i started to question the colonial gaze and its construction of the lesser Other. My collection and exhibition of portraits from small studios in India became an attempt to look at  the 'other's' attempts  to reclaim the right to self representation. 

These two articles popped up this morning . Taken together ( along with my previous post on the misuse of pictures in social meida) they  add a more contemporary  context to what is happening to  photographic representation  and self representation. Especially in our  digital duniya and in the networked world of social media it has invented  as a space  where exhibitionism is  now a new norm . 

“There has been an explosion of amateur exhibitionism. There must be 50 million unique Tumblr sites and I think 49 million of them must be of nudity!” jokes Gluibizzi.

He’s a self-confessed Tumblr addict — he follows 600 Tumblrs about art, the figure, the nude, swingers and dangly (and not-so-dangly) bits. “When I connected with Tumblr in 2008 it was on. The images were the exact kind I was looking for — non-sexual, really positive and super playful images of all body types.” His favorite Tumblr sites are those on which users post their own pictures.

“I’m always looking at photography, but painting and drawing is really what the end result is all about; making a handmade work of art in which people can see my touch,” says Gluibizzi.

http://www.wired.com/rawfile/2012/11/dan-gluibizzi-tumblr/

As far as I can tell, the group’s updates seem to divide their time between two things. Firstly, inviting female fans to submit half naked photographs of themselves to be ‘liked’ and commented on by the group’s members, presumably with the purpose of being later featured in the magazine itself for the financial reimbursement of ‘Validation’. And secondly, to conduct a complicated game called ‘Left or Right’ in which members are presented with two images (mostly of women) and asked to choose which side they’d prefer. While the game seems to mostly preoccupy itself with the challenge of choosing between which of the attractive women in the pairings the members would most like to insert their penises into, the occasional inclusion of morbidly obese women seems designed to elicit sophisticated responses like this: “I’ve got a awesome pick up line for the one on the right.. I’d just roll up with “Geeze you don’t sweat much for a fat mole”” and I’ll smashing it all night..”

Ladies, form an orderly queue.

None of this is perhaps surprising from a magazine that specialises in reducing women to their body parts and asking them to be grateful for it.

Unfortunately, this isn't just about the antics of a bunch of perpetually juvenile men and their light-hearted fondness for female objectification. It's also part of a much broader attempt to limit the roles women are allowed to play - to offer a retro system of reward for those who play along, and punishment for those who don't. It explains why a handful of fans and commenters on Zoo Weekly's Facebook page are women, why so many of them send free photos of themselves in g-strings and disembodied poses, and why these things leap so jarringly off the page with the palpable desperation to be noticed by the discerning critics around them. The world is full of the kind of female chauvinist pigs that Ariel Levy wrote about in her polemic of the same name; women who prostrate themselves before a cavalcade of men, whose mutually shared view of their value is inherently tied up in female willingness to subjugate itself for approval.

Critics of this kind of participation tend to be given a tedious lesson in choice feminism (a tedious distraction that tries to pretend every choice a woman makes is admirable by virtue of the fact she was brave enough to make it) or sex positivity (another tedious distraction that tries to pretend taking your clothes off for a male audience - and it is males who're being catered to here, no matter how many women claim to enjoy looking as well - is something that empowers women).

http://www.dailylife.com.au/news-and-views/dl-opinion/how-to-demean-a-woman-20121106-28vnc.html