5) Identity, Difference and The Gaze, Fiona Johnstone - 25/10/17

Today we had our next Photography in Context lecture in which Fiona talked about identity, difference and the gaze while also referring to the text 'Reading Racial Fetishism: The Photographs of Robert Mapplethorpe. My notes from the reading group can be seen below.

We started off the reading group defining identity and how it can be shown photographically, as you can see from the mind map in my notes above. Fiona then went on to link this to Grayson Perry's 'Map of Days' piece, in which he portrays his definition of his own identity through a map he's drawn.

Through this piece he highlights theres an ambiguous idea of self, portrayed as a walled city but also as a permeable space because he let other influences in. He describes identity as "fractured, layered, shifting, ambiguous", because identity is something performed over time. I agree with this outlook on identity, because its a mixture of your own cultural influences and genetics from your upbringing (essentialist outlook), but also other factors that you bring in such as your interests - fashion, music, likes and dislikes (anti-essentialist). I also like the idea of the walls because some parts of identity people want to keep private and guarded, and its a good way to represent this.

Through this talk on identity we also touched on Laura Mulvey's theory of male gaze in 'Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema'. From this I learnt a new word: Polemic which is defining a piece of writing in someone's opinion with the intent to make a change on a current viewpoint. Another point from this piece of writing which I thought was interesting was the way that this quote from Mulvey's text can also be applied to the images in 'Reading Racial Fetishism' of the black males photographed by Mapplethorpe: "In their traditional exhibitionist role women are simultaneously looked at and displayed, with their appearance coded for strong visual and erotic impact so that they can be said to connote to-be-looked-at-ness”.

If you take away the word 'women' the same can be said for Mapplethorpe's images, also reinforced by his own intent to show this. For instance in this quote it highlights that he wanted to show that a "male black body presents the spectator with a source of erotic pleasure in the act of looking". Here are some of his images below to illuminate this quote.

To conclude I found the text we had to read quite challenging and hard to connect with, so I'm glad the reading group allowed me to find some way to talk about it more. However I feel overall today's session didn't relate back to the text so much but talked more about other photography and information on a wider scale relating to the topic of identity, difference and gaze. They're not really topics I'm overly interested in, so I didn't find much inspiring material for my own project, although I can appreciate the debates around them and try to engage with them.

#readinggroup #photographyincontext