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Natasha Pyke
Throughout this academic year I have been researching the objectification and over sexualisation of women in the media. I have been looking into this through both my visual practise and dissertation, the early ideas for this project came from Laura Mulvey’s 1975 essay ‘Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema’,. This essay theorises how cinema objectifies women, usually in a sexualised way to appeal to men, this idea has been coined as the ‘male gaze’, which can also be applied to photography. Additionally, the essay discussed the ‘female gaze’ which is viewed mostly as an alternative to the dominant heterosexual male gaze and is generally viewed as portraying women in a way that provokes emotion and gives them more agency over how they/their bodies are presented. I think it is important to challenge the dominant narrative of how women are presented since it can be extremely harmful to female self-esteem and also how men grow up to treat the women in their lives.
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BA (Hons) Photography