The Power of the Image

Essays on Representation and Sexuality

Annette Kuhn

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2013
• ISBN:
  9781136137648
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Art
• Subtopic: Popular Culture in Art

Analyses a wide range of film and still photographs to explore culturally dominant images and how they work. Extensively illustrated, this challenging collection of essays is essential reading for all students of media and women's studies.

1

Living dolls and ‘real women’

Frances Borzello, Annette Kuhn, Jill Pack and Cassandra Wedd

The writers of this chapter were among a group of feminists who met over a period of time in the late 1970s to share a common interest in photographs – in making as much as in talking about them. Looking at images in magazines and advertisements, discussing each others’ pictures, setting up joint photographic projects, our efforts were largely informal, low-key and private. The group, which eventually acquired the name Second Sight, provided an opportunity to pool ideas and develop skills in circumstances free of the pressures to get things done, to produce results, which all of its members faced in one way or another in our everyday lives. The group did, however (not without hesitation, given the exploratory and informal nature of our activities), once or twice venture onto more public terrain. This collectively-written chapter was the result of one such venture.

It deals with some photographs of women which, as well as possessing exchange value in particular markets, also circulate a currency of codes through which ‘woman’ is constructed in representation. In this sense, the chapter picks up on Second Sight’s broad concern, as a group of feminists, with trying to understand how ‘mainstream’ photographic images work, how women are represented, how femininity is constructed, within them. Some of the issues touched on here – notably questions of spectatorship, of looking – find an echo in other chapters in this book. The specificity of this chapter, though, is its concern with certain conventions, particular genres, of still photography – notably glamour photography, the nude and documentary photography – and how these are expressed and reworked not only through individual images, but through sets of images whose meanings are crucially bound up in their particular forms of commodification. Meanings readable from photographs, in other words, are at all points connected with the status they occupy as products, with the contexts of reception and discourses of authorship, aesthetics, criticism and marketing which surround them. ‘Mainstream’ images in our culture bear the traces of the capitalist and patriarchal social relations in which they are produced, exchanged and consumed.

Given this, why should feminists be interested in looking at, in analysing, such images? For Second Sight, such a project was certainly felt to be of some use in relation to our own individual, collective and private activities as makers of photographs. It has relevance also to a broader, more public, feminist cultural politics, however: to what is described in this chapter as ‘our practice as producers of images of ourselves’. The implication is that in order to challenge dominant representations, it is necessary first of all to understand how they work, and thus where to seek points of possible productive transformation. From such understanding flow various politics and practices of oppositional cultural production, among which may be counted feminist interventions. But perhaps there is another justification for a feminist analysis of mainstream images of women: may it not teach us to recognise inconsistencies and contradictions within dominant traditions of representation, to identify points of leverage for our own intervention: cracks and fissures through which may be captured glimpses of what might in other circumstances be possible, visions of ‘a world outside the order not normally seen or thought about’?

Whenever we look at painted, drawn, sculpted or photographed images of women, it is important for us to remind ourselves that images of women have traditionally been the province and property of men.¹ Today our reading of these images must inevitably be informed by this insight, itself hard won in women’s struggle towards consciousness and autonomy. However, to hold exclusively to an awareness of the male hegemony of representations of woman is to set aside critical awareness of variations within this broad tradition, some of which may well turn out to be useful, even if negatively, in determining our practice as producers of images of ourselves. It is particularly difficult to make critical distinctions in that area of representation that takes women’s sexuality as its topic.

Rita Hayworth, 1942

New Orleans, about 1912

It is by now a commonplace that the transformation of the unclothed woman from being naked to being nude (one of the major ‘achievements’ of the European high art tradition) also brings about, in all forms of representation, the transformation of woman into object, the site of structures both of exchange and of looking. The spectator is the buyer, the buyer is the spectator.² To possess a woman’s sexuality is to possess the woman; to possess the image of a woman’s sexuality is, however mass-produced the image, also in some way to possess, to maintain a degree of control over, woman in general. In this situation the female spectator of images of women has until very recently been faced with a single option – to identify with the male in the spectator and to see woman, to see herself, as an object of desire.

Glamour, a notion applied almost exclusively to women, takes this process one step further. Glamour is understood generally to imply a sense of deceptive fascination, of groomed beauty, of charm enhanced by means of illusion. A glamorous/glamourised image then is one manipulated, falsified perhaps, in order to heighten or even to idealise. A glamorous image of a woman (or an image of a glamorous woman) is peculiarly powerful in that it plays on the desire of the spectator in a particularly pristine way: beauty or sexuality is desirable exactly to the extent that it is idealised and unattainable.

The crudeness of the relations of exchange and ownership which underpin a simple representation of the female nude is rendered more subtle and more powerful to the degree that the image is idealised. This is not, of course, to suggest that there are no glamorous nude images, on the contrary. But it is important to hold to this distinction between the glamour portrait and the nude since it enables us to pinpoint differences in the ways in which images of women work for us. Indeed, the distinction is a particularly useful (though not the only) one to be made in considering the very different images of women presented in books of photographs such as, on the one hand, E.J. Bellocq’s Storyville Portraits, and on the other, the Hollywood Glamor Portraits (though this book does also include pictures of men).³

In a sense, the Hollywood portraits are much easier to deal with than Bellocq’s photographs. Apart from the fact of their obvious provenance in the commercial film industry in the days of its ascendance, the 1930s and 1940s, they are immediately recognisable in aesthetic terms as part of that tradition of images of women which include – as well as publicity portraits of film stars – images of women in certain types of advertising and pinups of the glossy Playboy/Penthouse genre. It is no coincidence that the glamourised woman is particularly strongly represented in mass-produced, as opposed to traditional high art, images: the desire invoked by the idealised/unattainable ‘glamour girl’ reflects only too accurately the real unattainability, certainly, of the woman so represented, and also – and in many ways more importantly – of the image of perfection that glamour pictures offer.

The Playgirl of the Month may evoke masturbatory fantasies in the male spectator, it is true: for us as women, though, the perfectly beautiful film stars of the 1930s and 1940s and the perfectly beautiful women in the glossy clothes and cosmetic ads of today hold out a vision of perfection which few of us can ever attain. The desire for such perfection which, even while we love the movies of Garbo, Hayworth and others, we may well realise is hopeless, is to be displaced onto desire for the products they advertise or connote. As far as the film industry is concerned, to place the consumer of the films themselves in a constant position of desire is to bring him or her back to the cinema time and time again, to seek an unattainable fantasy life. The star system, founded crucially on idealised images of women, constitutes those images as commodities which would, in a self-perpetuating cycle, generate further relations of exchange and increased profitability. Women’s bodies and selling were identified: representations of women became the commodities that film producers were able to exchange in return for money.

A good deal of the groomed beauty of the women of the glamour portraits comes from the fact that they are ‘made-up’, in the immediate sense that cosmetics have been applied to their bodies in order to enhance their existing qualities. But they are also ‘made-up’ in the sense that the images, rather than the women, are put together, constructed, even fabricated or falsified in the sense that we might say a story is made up if it is a fiction. The wordplay is revealing. Glamour is in many ways about surface appearances: the expressionistic lighting of the Hollywood portraits – especially when looked at in relation to codes at work in certain films of the period (those of Lang, Ophuls and Cukor to name only three directors, many of whose films were, significantly, considered by the industry to be aimed primarily at a female audience) – with its play of light, shadow and texture, serves quite succinctly to demonstrate this.

Glamour photography is very much open to the criticism that, at the same time as it holds out idealised images, in particular of women, it also promotes the ideal woman as being put together, composed of surfaces and defined by appearance. It is here that the glamour tradition in all its manifestations may be seen to occupy a place dangerously close to another tradition of representation of women, from myth to fairytale to high art to pornography, in which they are stripped of will and autonomy. Woman is dehumanised by being represented as a kind of automaton, a ‘living doll’: The Sleeping Beauty, Coppélia, L’Histoire d’O, ‘She’s a real doll!’

Freud illustrated his essay on ‘The Uncanny’ with reference to the tale of the living doll Olympia in Hoffman’s Nachtstücken⁴: stories of this kind can evoke a real sense of unease. The Stepford Wives (1974, directed by Bryan Forbes), an otherwise unexceptional film, in which the women of a small Connecticut community are taken over by an alien force and turned into robots which service their husbands unquestioningly, was carefully marketed and widely reviewed in Britain as a film with feminist interest. This was precisely because of its mobilisation of the real fear women have of seeing ourselves in terms of what may be a male fantasy of control over our labour power and sexuality and our terror of becoming transformed according to that fantasy. It also suggests the potential threat to male sexuality posed by female desire.

The representations of women in David Hamilton’s Dreams of Young Girls photographs, which are quite evidently contemporary instances of the glamour tradition, may be seen as an attempt to neutralise the potentially threatening aspects of mature female sexuality by eroticising the immature, barely sexual, sexuality of pubescent girls. No doubt the mass distribution and sale of postcard reproductions of these photographs, the popularity of Hamilton’s two films, and the appearance in the late 1970s of a spate of movies dealing with child prostitution, are all significant in this respect: it is often said that nowadays the film industry cannot cope with ‘real women’.

The coincidence by which Hamilton’s postcards and prints happened to be on display alongside Bellocq’s in an exhibition at The Photographers’ Gallery in London of the Storyville Portraits is instructive as well as ironic. The apparent similarity of their subject matter scarcely masks their real dissimilarities, which are by no means solely the difference between the 1970s and 1912. Hamilton’s work falls squarely within the glamour tradition of representations of women, a tradition which seems to have assumed a degree of dominance, certainly where mass-produced photographic images of women are concerned. However, even though within the male hegemony over women’s image traditions other than this do exist, applying the labels ‘documentary’ or ‘realist’ to photographs such as Bellocq’s does not necessarily explain them, either.

Part of the problem is the subtitle of the book of Bellocq’s photographs. It describes them as pictures of New Orleans prostitutes taken around 1912, thus perhaps raising expectations of a work documenting hitherto unavailable information. Yet it is exceedingly difficult to locate precisely where in these photos the documentary element resides. One reason for the difficulty is that stylistically they do not fit into any existing pattern of prostitute pictures. Toulouse-Lautrec’s 1896 colour lithograph series Elles suggests (to the spectator) forbidden information, with its rumpled beds and hints of affection between prostitutes. Degas’ art, while not of prostitutes, shares a similar concern to reproduce the intimate, and shows women at their most private, and by implication, their most natural, in the tub or brushing their hair. His pastel paintings of nudes submitted to the last Impressionist show in 1886 caused an outrage, and his women were likened to cats licking themselves. ‘The nude’, he told George Moore, ‘has always been represented in poses which presuppose an audience, but these women of mine are honest, simple folk, unconcerned by any other interest than those involved in their physical condition. … It is as if you look through a keyhole.’⁵ Brassai, photographing in the 1930s, gives a factual, but normally private, view of prostitute and client dressing themselves after the act. In all three cases, the women are presented as unaware of the artist, a classic technique for convincing the spectator of the documentary truth of what is seen.

Bellocq’s prostitutes, by contrast, are posed. They collude with the camera, staring at it, smiling at it, acting coy for it, or proud. The product of such behaviour could rightly be expected to be an erotic photograph. Yet the erotic is not the strongest element in these pictures, even though in our culture representations of unclothed women often hold immediate sexual overtones. When nudity or nakedness can be held to be a legitimate documentary element, the line between revelation and display is indeed fine, and the distinction becomes that much more difficult to hold to when the subject of documentation bears connotations of illicit sexual activity.

If only because we do not really know why Bellocq made his portraits of New Orleans prostitutes, it is especially difficult to approach his work. Are the pictures titillating ones by a dirty old man who was able to gain access to brothels by means of his camera, the tool of his voyeurism? Or were they perhaps straight commercial portraits, commissioned by the women themselves or by the madams of their brothels to show to potential employers or clients? Neither of these explanations seems really satisfactory.

However, perhaps exactly because we are able to approach Bellocq’s work without the straitjacket of preconceived categories, our reading can be informed by an unusual and possibly productive degree of openness: because Bellocq’s intentions provide us with no clues, all we have to go on is the photographs themselves. Indeed, why should our understanding of these photographs be prefaced by knowing the intentions of the photographer? No reading of a picture can be unambiguous, or completely objective. Even knowing a photographer’s intentions should not prevent the viewer of the photograph from contributing to the information that the photograph emits.

What is immediately striking about these photographs is their variety. The women are posed against different backgrounds and are in varying degrees clothed or unclothed. A minority are completely naked. The frankness of the women in relation to the camera, and the very variety of the poses, suggests that the images might well be of the women’s own choosing rather than reflections of the photographer’s obsessions. Their documentary quality seems therefore to come at least as much from the subjects themselves as from the photographer, a point which is underscored by a comparison between these photographs and the coy soft-pornography of the same period: the women who are unclothed are more often than not naked rather than nude.

In general, the way in which they wear, or do not wear, their clothes constitutes the mark of their professional status as women whose sexuality is attainable – as opposed, that is, to the unattainability of the sexuality of the glamour nude. It is perhaps in this sense that the photographs may be given the label documentary, although it is a reflection of our puzzlement in the face of such unusual (unreadable) photographs of women that the picture chosen for the cover of the book is among the handful out of the whole collection which does actually cross the boundary between documentary and glamour.

To approach them as images of women is not the only way in which the Storyville and Hollywood portraits can be read, however. These photos also exist as ‘art’. The Storyville prints are collected for their quality of uniqueness, for the buyers’ knowledge that the reproductions are from originals found in a drawer decades after they were taken. The Hollywood portraits, though mass-produced and therefore, one might think, outside the realm of ‘art’, are collected for their nostalgia value, an artistically respectable category for assigning monetary value to the ephemera of times past. It is striking that, despite their diff...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Halftitle
• Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• Acknowledgments
• Introduction
• 1 Living dolls and ‘real women’
• 2 Lawless seeing
• 3 Sexual disguise and cinema
• 4 The Big Sleep: censorship, film text and sexuality
• 5 A moral subject: the VD propaganda feature
• Notes and references
• Further reading
• Index