The National Geographic is a journal that has been published since 1888, celebrating science, geography, history, and world culture. The book highlights the importance of photography’s function within journalism and globalisation, and how photographer’s working for the magazine were under the title ‘illustrations editors’ as a pose to photographers; this was fundamental for the readers of the magazine and for the photography movement as a whole.

The book describes the relationship between documentary photography and the artistic establishment as characterised by mistrust and attraction. Art as a medium to refine meaning and to say as much as possible without words, documentary photography explores instances with this meaning is present within our visual culture without construction.

The colour printing technique used by the National Geographic to achieve such vibrancy is called autochrome process, a process that uses potato starch onto paper. Using a glass plate with a thin wash of tiny potato starch grains dyed red, green, and blue, thus creating a filter, and adding a thin layer of emulsion was added over that. When the plate is flipped and exposed to light, the resulting image is developed into a transparency. I am interested in seeing is there are any companies that still use this technique to get my own prints developed.

Painshill park is an 18th century landscape garden was created between 1738 and 1773 by Charles Hamilton. The garden is comprised rare exotic trees, bridges that cross the lake and connect each island, a waterwheel, a grotto and the temple of Dionysus. The gardens reflect Hamilton’s application for natural beauty, creating a living painting out of a suburban landscape.

Dionysus is the Olympian god of wine, vegetation, pleasure, festivity, madness and wild frenzy; the God reflects the duality of the human and the divine, feminine and masculine, and the wild and the tamed.

Dionysus, son of Zues and the Theban princess Semele, was an androgynous effeminate character who was celebrated through festival and art. The theatre of Dionysus was the first and the largest theatre to be built in Athens, and hosted up to 17,000 people who gathered to enjoy music, dance and art.

Nietzsche’s The Birth of Tragedy from the Spirit of Music  puts forward the idea that the heyday of classic Athenian drama, was a logical development from Greek traditions of music, song and dance. He breaks this tradition into two tendencies, the Apollonian and the Dionysian. The Apollonian stresses the gentle reign of logic, pushing life to a somewhat unnatural ordering. The Dionysian is its exact opposite–it is governed by emotions and passions. The Dionysian suppresses his intellect to live as one with nature, and wine plays an essential role in his cult.

Dionysus has been really inspirational for my project as he embodies characteristics that oppose toxic masculinity; the masculine connected to the feminine, with emotions and with the self. Dionysus represents the liberated man, and can help me to consider ways that I can challenge contemporary masculinity.

Her Take: Rethinking masculinity exhibits the work of seven female photographers at VII agency to explore masculinity through the female perspective from a variety of different backgrounds. The exhibition was held in New York in 2017, and although I have not been able to physically visit, it is important to reflect on the way other female artists approach the subject of masculinity across cultures and how this can impact my own practice.

My most notable of these approaches were:

Sara Terry

She uses compositions from historical art to reverse gender roles and therefore change perspectives about contemporary masculinity.

Jessica Dimmock

Dimmock photographs transgender women who live as men and only as women in secrecy.

Nichole Sobecki

Nichole Sobecki has produced some of my favourite work; she captures moments that challenge stereotypes and show unseen perspectives.

The works of Lucian Freud help establish an understanding of masculinity in western culture. The exhibition at the RA explores his collection of self-portraits that capture changes in his expression, appearance and psychology over the course of his life. The exhibition shows the transformation from boy to man, how his life has transgressed and how consequently he sees himself; both his self-portraits and portraits of others capture a likeness that highlights what his grandfather has called the ‘Superego’.

His grandfather, Sigmund Freud, created psychoanalysis that disrupted the apparently natural concept of “masculinity” and looked what made its construction possible; this was the first serious attempt to establish major patterns in masculine behaviours. Sigmund Freud linked 3 moments to the evolution of masculinity:

1. The Interpretation of dreams: of continuity between normal and neurotic mental life, the concepts of repression and the unconscious, and the method that allowed unconscious mental processes to be read through dreams, jokes, slips of the tongue, and symptoms
2. The Oedipus complex: Psychosexual development during adolescent years of a child’s life induced desire for one parent and hatred for the other. For boys, was rivalry with the father and terror of castration suppressed sexual desires. A formative moment in masculinity and shaping relationships. He believed that all humans are born as Bisexual, but the knowledge of norms experience shape our sexuality during adolescence.
3. In a final stage, Freud developed his account of the structure of personality, in particular the concept of the superego, the unconscious agency that judges, censors, and presents ideals. The superego is formed, in the aftermath of the Oedipus complex, by internalised prohibitions from the parents. Freud gradually came to see it as having a gendered character, being crucially a product of the child’s relationship with the father, and more distinct in the case of boys than of girls. This provided the germ of a theory of the patriarchal organisation of culture, transmitted from one generation to the next through the construction of masculinity.

(INFORMATION SUMMARISED FROM https://science.jrank.org/pages/10172/Men-Masculinity-Freud.html)

Lucian Freud’s artwork refines his outlook on the world, how he sees through himself and brings out the human struggle to make sense of the world and their identity.  The way he paints captures the modern world through the male gaze within a traditionally masculine medium, and this is why he is so important to look at within this project.

As I am looking at western masculinity, I wanted to start by looking at the place where western civilisation began as we know it; the London Guildhall is the historic headquarters of London’s city government.

The hall is built over the oldest surviving religious stone chamber in London.

In addition to its community purpose, the was used as a place to hold important trials. Among the memorable trials held at the Guildhall are those of Anne Askew (1546), the Earl of Surrey (1546), Lady Jane Grey and her husband, Guildford Dudley (1553), and Archbishop Cranmer (also 1553).

There are several large, imposing statues to ‘men of national importance’ lining the hall. Throughout the Victorian gallery, the art epitomises the difference between masculine and feminine roles, how the ruling class understood the rest of the world and the capitalist changes that shaped modern society.

In the Pictures of London gallery, curators have sourced a variety of unusual and patriarchal scenes from the city’s history. This section also explores work that surrounds the integration of other cultures into London and how the immigration has impacted these societies.

The work exhibited at the Guildhall has helped me to actualise western masculinity within its patriarchal society.

Men as rulers.

Men at sea.

Men as spiritual leaders.

Men fighting for their country.

Men fighting for their lives.

Men deciding other people’s futures.

Men in search for power.

Men is search for culture.

AD394 has centred around research and testing of ideas related to perception and belonging within western culture. I have been looking at creatives and academics who are challenging our notion of beauty, truth, genius, civilisation, form, taste and status. Photography has been my predominant medium through my work and is something I will take forward with me to my FMP. The conclusion of the module has resulted in me wanting to explore perspectives of masculinity, how cultural diversity has impacted this representation and breaking down the stereotypes surrounding what masculinity means within western culture.

Ways of Seeing by John Berger has been inspired my progression throughout the research module; the book is comprised of both pictorial and written essays that suggest seeing is a political act influenced by class, race, sex and environment. The notion of perspective has been a common theme throughout my research; perspective makes the eye the centre of the visible world and how we intake information based on the trust of those around us. The result of this led to looking at artists such as Alison Jackson who uses fake news through photography to reinforce perceptions of public figures, and Adrienne Salinger who documented teenagers in their bedrooms in 90’s American to show the inaccuracy of the stereotypes represented in TV and advertisement.

I have been studying the work of Glen Erler, how he uses photography to explore ideas surrounding home and the impact this has on your practice. I was particularly inspired by how he achieves a filmic finish with his prints and how he uses the camera to capture the natural colour undertones of a space. The result of this research led me to experimenting with a medium format camera and exploring places close to my home, asking questions about what I see and how this impacts my work as a whole. Exploring both Seaford, a town I visited regularly as a child, and my home in South West London, I wanted to document my own perspective of each place, what interests me and how these things have impacted the way I see

Much of what is written in Ways of Seeing is related to how the presence of the masculine and the feminine and how this differs in historical art, how men understand women and therefore how women believe they should be understood. Men act and women appear. My later research into Grace Wales Bonner and Reba Maybury have inspired me to think about gender from the female perspective.

Burger proposes that a man’s presence centres around the promise of power he embodies, and a women’s presence centres around her attitude to herself and what can and cannot be done to her. This representation within western historical art defines our knowledge of masculinity and how power and ownership is central to maleness. Throughout my FMP I want to deconstruct this idea and explore how these values stem down into our culture as a whole.

Through completion of the FMP, I hope to develop a complete series of work that explores masculinity through a number of different culture from a female perspective. This will result in producing a collection of images that demonstrate the impact that dress has on perspective.  To complete this module, I will need to have access to different cultural groups and have solid research into the optimum ways I can represent them. I will need access to a medium format camera, large quantities of film and time to experiment with printing in the darkroom. I will also need to consider book printing to display my collection of final images, researching printing companies that I can work with to create the best possible displays of my final outcomes.

Bibliography for FMP

:

1. Berger, John, et al. Ways of Seeing:Penguin, 2008.
2. Perry, Grayson. The Descent of Man. Penguin Books, 2017.
3. Portrait of Britain. Hoxton Mini Press, 2019.
4. Forth, Christopher E. Masculinity in the Modern West: Gender, Civilization and the Body. Palgrave Macmillan, 2009.
5. Perez, Caroline Criado. Invisible Women: Exposing Data Bias in a World Designed for Men. Vintage Books, 2019.