Tag: watching the self

Seeing Ourselves: Women’s Self-Portraits by Francis Borzello

I recently finished this book by Frances Borzello, who also wrote The Naked Nude which I wrote about here and here. Seeing Ourselves provides some (euro-centric) history of and commentary on women’s self-portraits from the 16th-21st century. It was first published in 1998 and was revised and expanded in 2016.

Some quotes, notes and thoughts:

  • Interesting links between women, self-portraiture, and depictions of the self at work or as an artist. Commenting on trends in the 16th century, Borzello writes, “While all woman artists wanted to look as gracious as the ladies in portraits, the passivity and limited range of activities displayed in them was of little use in inventing ways to show off their professional skills. When an activity is shown, it is with decorum. The sitter holds a book or lays a calming hand on a small dog nestling in her voluminous skirt. Frequently she clasps her hands in a pose that resonates with prayer, constriction and passivity. Accessories are limited to a flower, child, fan or piece of embroidery. Since ‘lady’ and ‘career’ were contradictory concepts, women in portraits were expected to look neither active nor skilled.”

  • On Angelica Kauffman’s 1791 painting Self-portrait: Hesitating Between the Arts of Music and Painting Borzello writes, “Traditionally muses and personifications of the arts were female and artists were male. By inserting herself, a woman, between two other women, she presents a world of female creativity. The dynamic line of the composition, taking the viewer from the sheet of music along Painting’s outstretched arm tells a story of female energy and aspiration.”
  • Borzello describes an 1887 painting by Anna Bilinska titled Self-portrait with Apron and Brushes. She writes, “… Anna Bilinska paints herself taking a break from her work. She is convincingly scruffy. She has not bothered to remove her apron, and, although her hair began the day pinned up, some tendrils have escaped. As she sits on a homely bentwood chair, she bends forward to gaze intently at the spectator, a bunch of brushes held across her apron in one hand and her palette hanging down at the extremity of the other. The capacity of the language of self-portraiture to address women’s changing view of themselves is revealed in her pose, which had not been seen before. Bilinksa has set herself down in front of a curtain, which acts as the background for a model. The combination of transitory pose and backcloth is an understated but witty way of telling the viewer that she has become – but only temporarily – the model, not the artist.”

  • I liked the observations of links between self-portrait photography, vanity and mirrors. Borzello writes, “Since vanity for was centuries personified by a woman looking in a mirror, a female self-portrait is evidence of this female vice, a real-life personification in the manner of Artemisia Gentileschi’s Self-portrait as ‘La Pittura’, but far more damning. This negative view of women and their self-portraiture is part of a larger set of attitudes about women and art, all stemming from the fact that the female artist was a minority member of the art world with little control over the judgements, views and rules affecting her.”

  • Later, she writes about photography and reflections/reflective surfaces and how the mirror, “throwing off its link with vanity” is now “used to suggest the complexity of being human. Reflections fascinated photographers. The twentieth-century project of self-scrutiny was tailor-made for them and many charted their lives through their self-portraits.” She also writes, “As for that damning link of women, mirrors and vanity, I hope the self-portraits prove just how empty it is. women artists, and in particular photographers, make extremely creative use of the mirror. Vivian Maier, for example, a reclusive children’s nanny whose thousands of photographs were not revealed to the world until 2013, took self-portraits in any reflective surface she came across: shop windows, wing mirrors, wall mirrors. … Employed to care for others, secretive about her passion for photography, he self-portraits have less to do with vanity than with the creative possibilities of her craft and her untiring curiosity about the world around her.” I love mirrors and reflective surfaces and using them in my work.
  • Borzello writes about selfies and compares them to the artist’s self-portrait. She writes, “What is new about the selfie is the lack of agency. The one thing that defines it – the spur of the moment – is the one thing a self-portrait is not. Unlike an artist producing an image, the selfie-taker requires little thought or skill beyond the need to get one’s head in the picture and, if possible, to present one’s best angle. ‘Duckface’, selfie shorthand for the exaggerated lip pout, requires the palest shadow of the thought and skill required for the composition, colouring and explanatory surroundings and accessories of an artistically considered self-portrait. Even the fastest photographic self-portraitist needs experience and a moment to compose, crop and angle, not to mention the skills that come into play afterwards in the darkroom or through adjustments to the image on the computer. The selfie is the self-portrait democratised. Its distorted faces, inconvenient hands, hopeful attempts at looking great and hopeless attempts at humour that only interest and amuse the participants and their circle clarify the art involved in the artist’s self-portrait.”
  • The way she writes about selfies doesn’t resonate with me. It seems pretty judgemental and reductive. Selfies are a form of self-portrait but they are not works of art by default, just like any photo that any person takes is not a work of art by default. Therefore, it seems unnecessary to me to compare the two things and state that taking a selfie takes little effort or skill. Also, not all selfies are made with the intention of creating art but selfies and art are not mutually exclusive. My self-portraits are often selfies and they are also works of art. I would also argue that a lot of selfies are in fact not very “spur of the moment” and that selfie-takers often put a lot of thought into creating and editing their images, even if they are not making them with the view of making works of art. A lot of my self-portraits are quite “spur of the moment” and the poses and moments that I capture are often somewhat unplanned and accidental. Does that make them not artistic?
  • It’s interesting to look at photos like these that would have been quite novel at one time and are now a very recognisable style of image:
  • Mirror selfies and selfies in which a camera is visible must come very naturally to people. I have taken photos like that since I was a teenager and at that time I had no reference for it. I wasn’t aware that people had been doing this since it was possible, I hadn’t yet seen photos like the ones above. It was such a natural inclination for me, to want to capture the self and to see the self reflected in a mirror and to then want to capture this reflection. And not just capture the reflection but capture myself capturing the reflection.
  • Overall, Borzello’s argument is that self-portraits made by women are their own genre. She writes, “I came to the conclusion that no self-portrait by a woman could be taken for granted. Whether it was ‘good’ or ‘bad’ or ‘powerful’ seemed of less interest than the fact that a female face signals a radical departure from the norm and is therefore enough to stop the image being read in the same way that a male self-portrait is.” I agree that self-portraits by women will always be read differently to self-portraits made by men. Women will always have to justify what they do with their bodies and how they present their bodies more than men do. Images of women, especially self-portraits, are therefore much more loaded by default.

silhouette self-portraits

I made these self-portraits yesterday in a kind of accidental way. I was getting changed to take some of my usual self-portraits and I noticed the silhouette of my body on the wall in the light and took these.

I like experimenting with ways to subtly distort or strain my body in my photos, usually I do that by physically putting myself in certain positions. With these, I didn’t have to really do anything strenuous with my body, the shadow and light distorted things and created a strangeness naturally.

further thoughts on images of women/self-portraits by women

This is what I wrote in a previous post.

  • I don’t think there is any possible way for a woman to photograph herself and avoid projection from (most) viewers of those photographs regarding their judgement/assumptions about her levels of attractiveness and femininity and her sexuality or their assumptions about the absence of those things. Analysing her/their sexuality or lack of, or attractiveness or lack of, or promiscuity or lack of, seems to always be a primary way into the work of women/feminine artists who use their bodies at the forefront of their work. There will be judgements made about her/their level of exhibitionism and why she has chosen this apparent level of exhibitionism. Woman are always placed in categories regarding their appearance and the choices they have made (or are presumed to have made) about how to “present” their appearance.
  • She has a body of work. Using my body as work. I want my work to be lucrative. If my work is my body, what kind of body is a lucrative body. A lucrative body is an appealing body that can be commodified. How do I commodify myself. What does it mean to commodify myself and how does it feel. I’ve felt commodified in many ways before. Everyone is commodified, especially women, everything feels commodified.
  • There is a lot more to think about in relation to the above but I’m going to put that in a separate post.

Further thoughts.

Not long after I wrote the above, I opened Ways of Seeing by John Berger to a random page and read a little, including these parts:

… the social presence of a woman is different in kind from that of a man. A man’s presence is dependent upon the promise of power which he embodies. If the promise is large and credible his presence is striking. If it small or incredible, he is found to have little presence. The promised power may be moral, physical, temperamental, economic, social, sexual – but its object is always exterior to the man. A man’s presence suggests what he is capable of doing to you or for you. His presence may be fabricated, in the sene that he pretends to be capable of what he is not. But the pretence is always towards a power which he exercises.

By contrast, a woman’s presence expresses her own attitude to herself, and defines what can and cannot be done to her. Her presence is manifest in her gestures, voice, opinions, expressions, clothes, chosen surroundings, taste – indeed there is nothing she can do which does not contribute to her presence. Presence for a woman is so intrinsic to her person that men tend to think of it as an almost physical emanation, a kind of heat or smell or aura.

To be born a woman has been to be born, within an allotted and confined space, into the keeping of men. The social presence of women has developed as a result of their ingenuity in living under such tutelage within such a limited space. But this has been at the cost of a woman’s self being split into two. A woman must continually watch herself. She is almost continually accompanied by her own image of herself. Whilst she is walking across a room or whilst she is weeping at the death of her father, she can scarcely avoid envisaging herself walking or weeping. From earliest childhood she has been taught and persuaded to survey herself continually.

Men look at women. Women watch themselves being looked at. This determines not only most relations between men and women but also the relations of women to themselves. The surveyor of woman in herself is male: the surveyed female. Thus she turns herself into an object – and most particularly an object of vision: a sight.

The mirror was often used as a symbol of the vanity of women. The moralizing, however, was mostly hypocritical. You painted a naked woman because you enjoyed looking at her, you put a mirror in her hand and you called the paining Vanity, thus morally condemning the woman whose nakedness you had depicted for your own pleasure. The real function of the mirror was otherwise. It was to make the woman connive in treating herself as, first and foremost, a sight.

I’ve known for a long time that I’m interested in capturing the self, performing the self, capturing the capturing of the self, capturing the watching of the self etc. etc. And I’m drawn to other artists who do this, especially women artists. I wrote this about Francesca Woodman’s work in a previous post: She both captured herself and captured herself capturing herself, or interacting with herself, like in the images in which she’s interacting with a mirror or the one where she has created an image of her own shadow on the ground while she sits in her chair. I also like to capture myself capturing myself. Many of her images contain a doubling up of her own self.

I’m trying to consider deeply and specifically about why I’m interested in all of this and I think I’ve felt a frustration lately about the why. I know that the why is to do with this: A woman must continually watch herself. She is almost continually accompanied by her own image of herself. This sensation is ingrained within me and very familiar to me and I’m continually fascinated by it. I guess I’m trying to figure out how I can channel that fascination into my practice to create something that is formally inventive. I know I can’t figure that out with only thinking, so I’ll be taking some more self-portraits today and then I’ll reflect more on how I feel about them.