Mareen chronicles her experiences with photographer stereotypes — mostly that people are surprised when she, a young female, shows up for a shoot as the photographer, when they are expecting someone much older and male.
This is something I’m curious about, myself. Even if I were never to pursue photography professionally, any work I create is created in an environment that, true to the stereotype, has been saturated with 35+ white males. The same way that one can argue that even women have a male gaze when they look at themselves or each other (since they live in a societal system of patriarchy), one could argue that female photographers can and are still creating “male” work. In a system that has been dominated by older white males and the way they view the world, anyone entering that system could be unduly influenced by the type of work men have created collectively.
This is something I wrestle with, or that I am still confronting in my own work, especially as it relates to my fascination with the female figure and how art addresses that figure. Certainly there is a lot of work created by men that is fascinating, unique, and worth examination. I just wonder sometimes how much my own eye has been trained by men, versus how much of the way I see the world is something unique to me, Glynnis, a young woman who has experienced all that I’ve experienced, especially since in my own way I rebel against the patriarchal and gender-specific constructs of society.
This has been A Big Idea that I’ve been chewing on since the fall, if not earlier, and I’ve yet to really work through it (through my photographs or otherwise). Any thoughts, comments? You can reblog a response on tumblr, or shoot me an email.
I have never had the slightst idea that my work could be any different or less strong than a man’s (“Oh, for this job we need a male view”?!) and didn’t even make that distinction until these real-life encounters.
Although I did become a little bit suspicious of the whole thing when I started realizing that there are books on the market like “100 female photographers” — as if they were a minority that needed to be treated differently for some sort of political correctness and respect. (Just like painting, where males were dominant in art history, but that has to do with our past standards and history.)Feminism is something I was not into and I could never understand what their current problem was; all my life males and females had been treated the same way and were of the same average intelligence and skill — even if those skills were different.
Considering sensitivity, esthetics, clothing and awareness of one’s body etc., something that women are better at, I would even have to suggest women to be the better photographers. If they aren’t, it sure helps for variety.
I am mostly working with males who carry my equipment and put up light stands with logic and without being in fear of breaking a nail; so that I can focus on the soft stuff, which is thinking of and taking the pictures.