First Critique

Our first critique was this past Tuesday and Thursday, September 14th and 16th and I felt pretty good about my photos.  In hindsight they were not edited how I would have edited them now and would have presented them a bit differently.  I was playing around with the colors, and sizes so nothing was consistent.  I think the photos themselves were good, beautiful model, but I was playing around in photoshop and making them look different than when I had taken them straight out of the camera. 

So overall for the first critique, the images were seen as romantic and somewhat objectified (the single breast image), I liked that they were softly lit and a bit "romantic" even though I wasn't really going for that.  My goal was to present a beautiful body no matter the shape or size.  I do think that there is a particular audience for these photos and they are going to be females, particularly mothers!  And that is ok, because that is who I intended this body image project to be for.  Designed in book form, presented as a sort of visual guide to the shapes of a mother and oh, hey, look how beautiful she is.  

Arts 460 Class with Jan Banning

At the beginning of this semester Kathleen, told us that a Dutch photographer, Mr. Jan Banning, was going to attend some of our classes to talk about his work and to sit on 2 of our 3 critiques during the semester.  I was really excited about this opportunity! Some of the other students however, were quite nervous about it! haa!  

Jan Banning is known worldwide for his photography and had an exhibition of his work titled, Bureaucratics here in Columbia, SC from August 5 to September 19, 2010, at the 701 Center for Contemporary Art (aka 701 gallery).  He was also here as an artist-in-residence at 701 for six weeks.  You can read about the Bureaucratics work here, here, and here, and oh here too. You can purchase the book Bureaucratics and others from his website here. 

He came to our class on September 7, and talked to us about his work, showed us images from several of his projects and we got to ask lots of questions... or rather I asked him lots of questions! haa! He also brought with him his intern, Ben Kuhlmann, a photography student from Germany and we got to see Ben's work a little bit later in the semester.

Jan Banning's photography is fascinating and is a mix of photojournalism, documentary style, and fine art portraiture photography as well as a little bit of visual anthropology.  Exactly my cup of tea!  I was fascinated by his project/exhibition Bureaucratics, but really, really moved by his most recent work, Comfort Women/Troostmeisjes.  You can read an article about the project here.  The Comfort Women book is a series of portraits taken by Mr. Banning of Indonesian women who as young girls were forced into sex slavery for the Japanese army during WWII.  He photographed these women while anthropologist and Dutch journalist Hilde Janssen interviewed them about their forced prostitution as young girls.  

Description of Comfort Women by Jan Banning from the publisher:

"Raping women seems to be a normal byproduct of wars. During World War II, the Japanese military even set up a system for sex slavery: Tens of thousands of 'comfort women' in Asia were forced into prostitution at military brothels. In addition, many girls were abused sexually in railroad wagons, factory warehouses or night after night at home. Most of these women have suffered physical and emotional consequences ever since. 

Jan Banning and Hilde Janssen visited Indonesian women who during the war were victims of forced sexual labor. In this book, 18 of them break the persistent taboo against speaking out on the issue. Showing them in combination with Japanese war posters, the book presents male and female sides of war, and propaganda versus reality. Short narratives depict the fate of these and other former comfort women, painting a gripping picture of this hidden history." 

You can purchase the book here at his website, and I highly recommend it!

He also has published a book of portraits about the men who were forced laborers on the Burma and Sumatra railways, titled: Traces of War, Survivors of the Burma and Sumatra Railways. One of the portraits in the book is of his father, Frans Banning, who was forced to work on the railway. Jan Banning's grandfather (Fran's father) was also a forced laborer during the war.  

From the publisher:

Allied victory in the Pacific celebrates its sixtieth anniversary in August. Among the celebrants will be a small, largely forgotten group reliving nightmares of captivity. Dutch, English, Australian and American prisoners of war worked among more than a quarter of a million Asians—so called romushas—forced by the Japanese to build railways in Burma and Sumatra. Conditions were desperate: between 50 and 80 per cent of the romushas did not survive. Here, Jan Banning has interviewed and photographed 24 Dutch and Indonesian survivors. His haunting images show them as they worked, naked from the waist up. Their words elicit, with a matter-of-fact disinterest, the misery of their constant understanding of death. Unsurprisingly, they have hitherto been loath to discuss their ordeals. 

If you have a chance to see his work, go, it's amazing and just really, really inspiring.  

Part 2: How I got here

So after a lot of thought and consideration I decided that yes I wanted to take female nude photographs.  My mind started to run through the people I knew and whom I thought would be a "great model."  I immediately thought of my friend Alyse. I asked her to participate in my photography project before I had even really defined it and she agreed.  

I was unconsciously thinking of the "ideal" body type I wanted to portray: thin, toned, well proportioned... and then I realized I was falling into the same trap as our mass media, the mass culture that thin is the ideal, that that beauty lies in how much you weigh or if you are a size 2 jeans.  And I said to myself that's crap! I can't do that!  All that I struggle against by raising my daughter to have a healthy self esteem, a healthy body image, there was no way I was going to portray nude females that were only the  "perfect" body size.  What kind of message would that send to my daughter?

Not wanting to step into that, I thought about my friends (who are mostly moms) and their different body types and one night I was in the shower and it came to me!  MOTHER'S bodies.  With all of the perfections and imperfections that a woman sees in herself and her body after having a child.  I thought about focusing my work on specific body parts, and relating them to body image. 

Did I want to focus on the mother's body as a temple, a shrine to honor and worship and represent that visually as an idol, or did I want to portray it as truth and reality?  I also wondered about portraying the sexuality and sensuality of a woman after having children.  I also thought about confronting the stereotypical, maybe even perhaps mythological housewife/mother lounging around, half naked eating bons bons on the sofa. 

So I presented some of these ideas to my professor and she was intrigued by the idea.  So off I went to shoot my first mom, my friend Rachelle. I photographed her in her living room by her big picture window, using her white curtains as a large softbox. I took about a 30 minutes to get the photos I wanted and had a great conversation with her. The next step was editing them and printing them for the following week's critique which I will talk about in the next few posts. The following week's critique was something completely new to me and to the rest of the class.  We were to have an internationally known photographer come to our class for several sessions to critique our work and perhaps help us with our portfolios. yikes!