The female gaze: the reflected gaze, the external gaze.
Shirin Laghai © 2012
The way is unimpeded harmony;
Its potential may never be fully exploited.
It is as deep as the source of all things:
It blunts the edges, resolves the complications, harmonizes the light.
Lao Tzu
The female gaze: the external gaze, the voyeuristic gaze.
Shirin Laghai © 2012
“It is a nostalgic time right now, and photographs actively promote nostalgia. Photography is an elegiac art, a twilight art. Most subjects photographed are, just by virtue of being photographed, touched with pathos. An ugly or grotesque subject may be moving because it had been dignified by the attention of the photographer. A beautiful subject can be the object of rueful feelings, because it has aged or decayed or no longer exists. All photographs are memento mori. To take a photograph is to participate in another person’s (or thing’s) mortality, vulnerability, mutability. Precisely by slicing out this moment and freezing it, all photographs testify to time’s relentless melt.”
On Photography / Susan Sontag
The female gaze: the voyeuristic gaze, the external gaze.
Shirin Laghai © 2012
We shall not cease from exploration
And the end of all our exploring
Will be to arrive where we started
And know the place for the first time.
T.S. Eliot
—Dorothea Lange
The female gaze: the voyeuristic gaze, the contextual gaze, the external gaze.
Shirin Laghai © 2012
“An observer of human nature, Sir.” said Mr. Pickwick.
Charles Dickens
The female gaze: the comparative gaze, the contextual gaze, the surveying gaze.
Shirin Laghai © 2012
“And so she comes to consider the surveyor and the surveyed within her as the two constituent yet always distinct elements of her identity as a woman.”
Ways of Seeing / John Berger
The gaze in motion - take one.
Shirin Laghai © 2012
The gaze in motion - take two.
Shirin Laghai © 2012
心
( こころ / Kokoro )
Shirin Laghai © 2012
“…the hand at the right degree of openness, the right density of abandonment…”
Camera Obscura / Roland Barthes
A recent piece of Japanese calligraphy I did. Kokoro translates as “heart”.
—Julia Margaret Cameron
The female gaze: the distorted gaze, the concealed gaze.
Shirin Laghai © 2011
“We don’t dream the dream, the dream dreams us.”
Carl Jung
—Antoine d’Agata
“It’s not how a photographer looks at the world that is important. It’s their intimate relationship with it.”
Antoine d’Agata
Antoine d’Agata is without doubt one of the most unique and important photographers of our age. His imagery is characterised by an intense and highly subjective experience that pushes the limits of social documentary photography. Born in Marseille, 1961, he left France in 1990 to study at The International Centre for Photography in New York alongside Nan Goldin and Larry Clark. His work has been published in the books Insomnia, Vortex, Stigma and Agonie amongst others, and he has been exhibited internationally at galleries and festivals including Rencontres d’Arles, Noorderlicht, FotoFreo and The Photographers Gallery, London.
He has been a member of Magnum Photos since 2004 and is represented by Galerie Les Filles du Calvaire in Paris.
More and more I find myself being drawn to, and influenced by, the eye Antoine d’Agata views the world through:
“The brutality of the form, the intensity of the vision obligates us, still more than images that pretend to document, to involve ourselves with the reality of what we are seeing. The spectator can exist then, no longer finding himself in the position of voyeur or consumer but as sharing an extreme experience, wondering about the state of the world and of himself…
“…The only photographs that truly exist are the ” innocent ” images. We find them in the family photo albums or in the police archives. Beyond serving as a simple documentation of reality or of a certain aesthetic sense, they attest to the role of the photographer, of his implication, of the authenticity of his position in that moment. The compositions of light, narrative, are no longer, for me, fundamental problems but superfluous lies. What interests me today in an image? The perspective that has justified the act of photography, the interference of the experience, of the ongoing scene, the texture, the material, the meaning of the self-portrait, of the individual, the incoherence of the unfolding sequence, the maniacal reconstruction of the random experience the photographs, like words, are meaningless when isolated…
“To criticize in a coherent manner, the dominant image actually demands from a photo that it is lucid in the midst of its messy situation, from the experience between a glance and a good, hard look, the camera and the unconscious, in its fundamentally tainted rapport with reality and fiction. This approach cannot conceive that within multiplicity, associating technique and practice, sometimes opposite each other in their use of the photographic language, I seek to reveal the inherent contradictions to the ” use ” of documentary photography, that should supposedly transcribe tangible reality while at the same time, do nothing more than report a myriad of experiences.
“I can then make use of the world for my own ends and in a basically solitary experience, remodel it, and transform it at will, almost as if without images, the world no longer exists.”
And another great interview with him for your reading pleasure:
http://www.vice.com/read/fear-desire-drugs-fucking-608-v17n11
—Ansel Adams
