After having our class lecture which included portraiture, pictorialist portraiture, and images of body as landscape, reading the articles and readings assigned, and looking at and thinking about images, i realized some very interesting things. I feel like body as landscape today is very sexual. Everyday we look at images of bodies that are practically nude and it is perfectly okay and socially accepted. That is because sex sells. Sex sells lingerie and underwear and even clothing.
Sex sells cheeseburgers.
Sex sells everything, this could go on for days and i could run out of upload room. Basically, these may not be great images of body as landscape such as Maholy Nagy's or May Ray's, however these images do portray today's version of body as landscape. At some points we do not even think about the person as a whole anymore we just look at their body or the clothes or lack thereof that are on it. One great example is the image of the girls curve with a sports car curves (perhaps a corvette). Unfortunately i could not find that image to post, however that is the idea.
These ideas of body as landscape and sexuality in photography tie very interestingly to the readings, because in the article "1850-1918: Gender and Eroticism in Pictorialist Photography," the topic of pornographic usage for photographs of women is discussed. Artistic nudes and art photographs "presented the female body as an aesthetic and erotic object" in the 1850's in France, just as photographs of women do today. It is discussed in the article that photographs of women were used as softcore porn, and even viewed in galleries for mens' sexual fantasies and voyeurism. I feel that this is a very interesting connection between the history of photography and the present state of photography.
Another Very interesting point that i found in the reading is that during the same period, England mainly focused on the female body rather than the male body, just as France did. However, England, more often, clothed the women. Many people discuss the topic of how the way women were portrayed at this time, in photographs, represented the social and political issues surrounding them at the time. Such as, using their photographic image to make political statements about birth control use, and about regulating prostitution. I feel that in a similar sense, we use photography in the media and in our culture, to make the female body image look a certain way, and tell young girls and women that they are supposed to look like that. We are programmed to think that women who are thin and beautiful, and get their hair done and colored, and get manicures, and dress a certain way, are happy, will get married, have beautiful lives, and be successful. In this same sense, Dove used photography in their campaign to make a social statement that women are all strong and beautiful and that they should embrace the skin they are in and be proud and confident.
This goes against the popular current ideas of plastic surgery in a world where, for many plastic surgery is a perfectly normal thing. Some women have botox appointments setup like dentist appointments, or maybe even more frequently. This is a social and cultural issue and it is similar to those concepts of societies ideas of birth control back in the day. It is interesting that we are still using the photographic images of the body to speak for our social and political issues just as they once did in England, and I am sure elsewhere as well.
