Self-portraits
If we were to attempt a contextual reading of this contemporary photographic representation, it would most certainly be in the area of the self-portrait where all the issues at stake are to be found. Since Cindy Sherman and her Untitled Film Stills, self-portraiture has become the field where the aesthetics and the politics of representation converge into a subversive whole that dynamises the coherence of orthodox representation. Self-portraiture has provided the stage for the enactment of a friction inherent in all representation: the friction between reality and fiction, inner and collective self.
In this expression of photography’s existential concerns, the lens does not unveil the subject but, contrary to what is expected, masks it. The outcome is a photographic surface that obscures vision and blurs the frontiers between what is represented and what is not, jeopardizing the very metaphysical envisioning of photography as the potential “mirror of the soul”. In a schematic paraphrase of the Lacanian discussion of the gaze, the mirror breaks and the lens becomes a vehicle of transportation to an “elsewhereness”, whence what is projected is not the physical idol of the self but the self after the image. In this “elsewhereness”— not in the absence of the subject, but in its distortion and resurrection as the embodiment of otherness — the fluidity of representation cancels what the retina longs to see. A window opens and speech is conferred to the “Other”. This unfamiliar and uncanny “Other”, in aesthetic, political or gender terms, does not simply aliment the overall practice of portraiture today but provides it with its raison d’être.
The portfolio of the photographer Jen Davis is an exemplary case of this tendency. In her Self-Portraits, a series, which she has been methodically building up since 2002, Davis directs her gaze and content to herself as an overweight American woman subjected to the pressures and expectations of the outside world. By displaying and thus defeating her insecurities about body image, Davis lends her own “otherness” a space of representation. Formulated as a voluntary conceptual statement addressed to a generic matrix of gender categories, her oeuvre acquires a broader symbolic value, while instructing perception and interpretation into a complex, yet very precise network of gender, politic and aesthetic relations.
The pictures show Davis in her domestic settings and surroundings. Associated with food, many of these moments provide visual testimony for a personal documentary of obesity tinged with loneliness and culpability. We often see Davis in mundane everyday-life scenarios —watering plants in her garden, hanging her knickers on a clothesline, or on the beach in the company of friends— yet we cannot help but feel her presence as the subtle intrusion of an outsider carrying the burden of a body that inhibits social interaction.
Davis scarcely confronts the camera and the viewers. More often than not, she seems to direct her gaze towards a vantage point outside the picture. From a distance, we observe her in moments of self-absorption, watching the external world through her window. Walls, pillars, door frames and other architectural elements rise between Davis and us, break our field of vision into pieces, and obstruct our act of looking at her. As such, they punctuate the uneasiness of our perception and its potentially conditioning force in the misconception of her being and life.
In this confinement of flesh and perception, the house becomes the “wrapper” of the self but also an off-limits space. The house seals, conveys and protects, as much as it allows for spontaneous moments of personal recognition to take place. In the intimacy of her bedroom, Davis is gradually able to overcome the oppressive external gaze and perform her sensuality and self. The body is the undisputed protagonist in these sequences of close-ups — body, flesh and silky skin unfolding restlessly beneath the shower towel, expanding playfully all over the frame, constituting the main volume of the photographic surface. We can feel, sense the odour and touch this “Other”. The distance between our eye and the photographic reality becomes dissolved like never before.
By eliminating this distance, Davis’ self-directed gaze unavoidably strikes us. Overweight women may have been at their best in Baroque art, but with this exception, fashion photography and television have done much excluded them and worshipped the thin silhouette instead. Alongside the queerness of Diane Arbus, and the plethoric dominant women of Federico Fellini, Jen Davis proposes an alternative set of representations that “naturalise” the female body, with its abundant curves and sensuality. And yet, it does not end there.
From the tense scrutiny of her first images, seeking to heal the victimised self, Davis goes on further to conduct a wide-ranging exploration of this unseen “Other” femininity. Moreover, she veils this femininity anew with a masquerade of sensuality and eroticism that still allows a view of her chapped legs. For, she has finally come to terms with herself. As a result, she is free to appropriate and critically rework the stereotypical patterns of female representation. Her self-perception dominates our perception as viewers and validates her actions before our eyes. She has finally taken control.
This latter element becomes particularly evident in Davis’ more recent series of men in I ask in Exchange, which stages a hypothetical and fictional relationship between the artist-subject and her half-dressed male companions. Here, an inner and powerful female gaze materializing sexual fantasies in a commodity world substitutes the external gaze of her earlier self-portraits. The unmediated eroticism and sensuality of these pictures put into effect an extreme objectification of a body suppressed by its “to-be-looked-at-ness”. It is as if the mere enactment of a role before the camera were sufficient for Davis to become that “Other” she has long yearned for in these pictures since she becomes both a protagonist and a symbol of attraction, both a bearer and a maker of meaning.
It is precisely this clash between the objectified body and its striking otherness that produces uneasiness when contemplating Jen Davis’ photographs. We feel compelled to question the actual possibility of this really happening. We are tempted to think in terms of a staged narrative progress, longing for a resolution. We expect the body to transform into something else as the series evolves. But resolution never comes.
Over these recent months, Jen Davis’ work has obtained an unexpected parallel, the fairytale ascension and descent of Susan Boyle in Britain’s Got Talent. The tension of our gaze tagging Davis with admiration, as an “emerging twenty-something overweight female photographer”, in a way revives the collective euphoria of the program’s audience towards a woman whose looks absurdly excluded the possibility of her having a decent voice. At first glance, even Davis’ artist statement seeks to render her Self-Portraits effective in this sense; it is so politically correct that is hard to resist. But it is worth doing so. It is precisely when we decide not to consume the “myth” of the photographic surface but rather see beyond its raison d’être on the level of perception that paradoxically Jen Davis’ photographs become effective. They become effective and meaningful to the extent they impart us with the awareness of the narrowness of preconceptions about beauty. The disjunction between the gaze and photography’s stillness calls for an energising of our consciousness. Insofar as the body succumbs to the lens, it becomes nothing but a masquerade and nothing but an image; no less than a copy without an original and no more than a body after an image.
Text by Natasha Christia
All Rights Reserved.
Published in 1000 Words 5/July 2009
If we were to attempt a contextual reading of this contemporary photographic representation, it would most certainly be in the area of the self-portrait where all the issues at stake are to be found. Since Cindy Sherman and her Untitled Film Stills, self-portraiture has become the field where the aesthetics and the politics of representation converge into a subversive whole that dynamises the coherence of orthodox representation. Self-portraiture has provided the stage for the enactment of a friction inherent in all representation: the friction between reality and fiction, inner and collective self.
In this expression of photography’s existential concerns, the lens does not unveil the subject but, contrary to what is expected, masks it. The outcome is a photographic surface that obscures vision and blurs the frontiers between what is represented and what is not, jeopardizing the very metaphysical envisioning of photography as the potential “mirror of the soul”. In a schematic paraphrase of the Lacanian discussion of the gaze, the mirror breaks and the lens becomes a vehicle of transportation to an “elsewhereness”, whence what is projected is not the physical idol of the self but the self after the image. In this “elsewhereness”— not in the absence of the subject, but in its distortion and resurrection as the embodiment of otherness — the fluidity of representation cancels what the retina longs to see. A window opens and speech is conferred to the “Other”. This unfamiliar and uncanny “Other”, in aesthetic, political or gender terms, does not simply aliment the overall practice of portraiture today but provides it with its raison d’être.
The portfolio of the photographer Jen Davis is an exemplary case of this tendency. In her Self-Portraits, a series, which she has been methodically building up since 2002, Davis directs her gaze and content to herself as an overweight American woman subjected to the pressures and expectations of the outside world. By displaying and thus defeating her insecurities about body image, Davis lends her own “otherness” a space of representation. Formulated as a voluntary conceptual statement addressed to a generic matrix of gender categories, her oeuvre acquires a broader symbolic value, while instructing perception and interpretation into a complex, yet very precise network of gender, politic and aesthetic relations.
The pictures show Davis in her domestic settings and surroundings. Associated with food, many of these moments provide visual testimony for a personal documentary of obesity tinged with loneliness and culpability. We often see Davis in mundane everyday-life scenarios —watering plants in her garden, hanging her knickers on a clothesline, or on the beach in the company of friends— yet we cannot help but feel her presence as the subtle intrusion of an outsider carrying the burden of a body that inhibits social interaction.
Davis scarcely confronts the camera and the viewers. More often than not, she seems to direct her gaze towards a vantage point outside the picture. From a distance, we observe her in moments of self-absorption, watching the external world through her window. Walls, pillars, door frames and other architectural elements rise between Davis and us, break our field of vision into pieces, and obstruct our act of looking at her. As such, they punctuate the uneasiness of our perception and its potentially conditioning force in the misconception of her being and life.
In this confinement of flesh and perception, the house becomes the “wrapper” of the self but also an off-limits space. The house seals, conveys and protects, as much as it allows for spontaneous moments of personal recognition to take place. In the intimacy of her bedroom, Davis is gradually able to overcome the oppressive external gaze and perform her sensuality and self. The body is the undisputed protagonist in these sequences of close-ups — body, flesh and silky skin unfolding restlessly beneath the shower towel, expanding playfully all over the frame, constituting the main volume of the photographic surface. We can feel, sense the odour and touch this “Other”. The distance between our eye and the photographic reality becomes dissolved like never before.
By eliminating this distance, Davis’ self-directed gaze unavoidably strikes us. Overweight women may have been at their best in Baroque art, but with this exception, fashion photography and television have done much excluded them and worshipped the thin silhouette instead. Alongside the queerness of Diane Arbus, and the plethoric dominant women of Federico Fellini, Jen Davis proposes an alternative set of representations that “naturalise” the female body, with its abundant curves and sensuality. And yet, it does not end there.
From the tense scrutiny of her first images, seeking to heal the victimised self, Davis goes on further to conduct a wide-ranging exploration of this unseen “Other” femininity. Moreover, she veils this femininity anew with a masquerade of sensuality and eroticism that still allows a view of her chapped legs. For, she has finally come to terms with herself. As a result, she is free to appropriate and critically rework the stereotypical patterns of female representation. Her self-perception dominates our perception as viewers and validates her actions before our eyes. She has finally taken control.
This latter element becomes particularly evident in Davis’ more recent series of men in I ask in Exchange, which stages a hypothetical and fictional relationship between the artist-subject and her half-dressed male companions. Here, an inner and powerful female gaze materializing sexual fantasies in a commodity world substitutes the external gaze of her earlier self-portraits. The unmediated eroticism and sensuality of these pictures put into effect an extreme objectification of a body suppressed by its “to-be-looked-at-ness”. It is as if the mere enactment of a role before the camera were sufficient for Davis to become that “Other” she has long yearned for in these pictures since she becomes both a protagonist and a symbol of attraction, both a bearer and a maker of meaning.
It is precisely this clash between the objectified body and its striking otherness that produces uneasiness when contemplating Jen Davis’ photographs. We feel compelled to question the actual possibility of this really happening. We are tempted to think in terms of a staged narrative progress, longing for a resolution. We expect the body to transform into something else as the series evolves. But resolution never comes.
Over these recent months, Jen Davis’ work has obtained an unexpected parallel, the fairytale ascension and descent of Susan Boyle in Britain’s Got Talent. The tension of our gaze tagging Davis with admiration, as an “emerging twenty-something overweight female photographer”, in a way revives the collective euphoria of the program’s audience towards a woman whose looks absurdly excluded the possibility of her having a decent voice. At first glance, even Davis’ artist statement seeks to render her Self-Portraits effective in this sense; it is so politically correct that is hard to resist. But it is worth doing so. It is precisely when we decide not to consume the “myth” of the photographic surface but rather see beyond its raison d’être on the level of perception that paradoxically Jen Davis’ photographs become effective. They become effective and meaningful to the extent they impart us with the awareness of the narrowness of preconceptions about beauty. The disjunction between the gaze and photography’s stillness calls for an energising of our consciousness. Insofar as the body succumbs to the lens, it becomes nothing but a masquerade and nothing but an image; no less than a copy without an original and no more than a body after an image.
Text by Natasha Christia
All Rights Reserved.
Published in 1000 Words 5/July 2009
