Second round of shoots and editing

I decided to try out the images in black and white to see what they looked like:

During the feedback session it was mentioned that the black and white didn't work as well as the colour, when i colour it brought the images to life and you can see more of the surroundings and it gives the images a sense of personality. 

I decided to try editing the images to make the colours more vibrant and to give the images a grainy effect, this is inspired by the likes of Petra Collins' candid style images.

I definitely think the natural lighting in the images makes them stand out, the shadows also add depth to the images. I agree now seeing them in colour that i prefer them like this.

I now want to experiment with the survey feedback, as to whether i should try layering the text over the images or just use it as a caption.

I am still unsure as to whether the differing eye contacts bother me, the uniformity in the images is there as they are all landscape.

Choosing my subjects

With finalising that i was going to focus on girls aged between 14 and 18 it was time to find my subjects, i wanted to select between 10 and 15 girls so that i had a large variety and then could choose the best images for the final shows. I have quite a few contacts with girls this age due to having a 14 year old niece and used to teach the younger years dance while in college so it was just down to contacting them.

I set up a group message and explained to the girls my idea, i asked whether they would be willing to take part and what it would involve. The majority of the girls i asked were up for it so i then wrote the survey and sent it out. In total 14 girls took out the survey which was a perfect number and it meant that the majority of the answers would relate to my images as i would only be photographing the girls that took the survey.

The 14 girls i asked in the group message and who filled out the survey were:

Maddy Lumley - Age 15
Dani Mason - Age 16
Annie Crean - Age 17
Ellie Titchard - Age 17
Lucy-Kate Roylance - Age 17
Kirsty Massey - Age 14
Lauren Hesketh - Age 16
Sophie Instone - Age 15
Megan Ditchfield - Age 16
Hannah Shephard - Age 14
Jess Saunders - Age 14
Isobel Oldland - Age 14
Toni Mason - Age 14
Elle Crookell - Age 18

To start off with i decided to photograph ten of the subjects to get a feel for the whole idea,
I photographed:

Isobel Oldland - Age 14
Jess Saunders - Age 14
Kirsty Massey - Age 14
Maddy Lumley - Age 15
Lauren Hesketh - Age 16
Dani Mason - Age 16
Toni Mason - Age 14
Annie Crean - Age 17
Ellie Titchard - Age 17
Elle Crookell - Age 18

Here are the initial images from the first shoot:

Before this shoot i asked the subjects if they were okay with me photographing them in their room and got their parents permission. I also said that they did not need to tidy their room as it adds character and said to dress and do their hair etc only how they feel comfortable i wanted them to just dress and be how they normally are in day to day life. 

My thoughts from these images are that i think the setting works well, being in their personal space of their bedroom makes the images more interesting as you can see a bit about each person from their surroundings. I also found that these girls had many interesting things on the walls of their bedrooms and even though i asked for no preference on what their wear, many seemed to dress in bold t shirts with statement words on them.

I wanted to keep to the theme of landscape as it was commented on in feedback that this works better as you can see more of the surroundings. Things that were commented on for changing were the eye contact or no eye contact, i don't mind too much that there are a bit of both in this series of images although i agree that some look more posed than others. I do want a natural feel to my images but with some girls being uncomfortable in front of the camera their natural instinct in to look down or away from the camera which creates awkwardness, i don't think this is necessarily bad, due to it showing how they are affected by cameras and the media watching them.

The next stage is more shoots and editing...

Photographers who have inspired this project:

There are several photographers i have looked at and been inspired by during the run up to this project. One being Cindy Sherman and her photography work as she takes on the roles of other women in her self portraiture.

Sherman prefers her images to not be referred to as 'self portraits' as she says that it is not her in the images, but the person she is portraying. She uses her photography to address various issues in the modern world, one of the most prominent being 'the role of a woman'. She uses her work to raise challenging and powerful questions about the role and representation of women in society, the media and the nature of the creation of art.

On her website it explains:

' Her photographs show her dressed up in wigs, hats, dresses, clothes unlike her own, playing the roles of characters. While many may mistake these photographs for self-portraits, these photographs only play with elements of self-portraiture and are really something quite different. In each of these photographs, Sherman plays a type -- not an actual person, but a self-fabricated fictional one. There is the archetypal housewife, the prostitute, the woman in distress, the woman in tears, the dancer, the actress, and the malleable, chameleon-like Sherman plays all of these characters.'

Another photographer who has inspired me for this project is Renieke Dijkstra and her Teens project. Between 1992 and 1996 Dijkstra photographed a series of full length portraits of teenagers on various beaches. She wanted to explore the themes of national identity and class in these portraits and stood her subjects before sea, sand and sky to add a mythical element to the work. She captures the vulnerable and volatile nature of the teenagers.

Dijkstra's earlier work like Teens has been opposed by some of her newer work including 'The Buzz Club' it has been described as 'moving from an exploration of teenage anxieties to an exploitation of young, not fully aware individuals.' Her images show how the subjects are feeling 'some of them look back at you angst that has sent many a teen to their rooms. Others reveal fear, loneliness and sometimes a surprising and indefinable sort of spectral  transcendence.

The contemporary art magazine Frieze described Dijkstra's complex psychologies included in her images as 'Self-concious is an implicitly contradictory description. It can mean to be positively self aware and also the opposite, to be painfully unsure of oneself'.

David Hamilton is another photographer who inspired me greatly for this project. He is a british photographer best known for his images of young women. Hamilton's images are very raw and natural but have come under much scrutiny as to whether they are art or pornography. He explores girls budding into womanhood but also touches upon girls at the younger end of the age spectrum.

The Beauty Myth

I came across the book The Beauty Myth by Naomi Wolf and decided it may be good to read as research for this project. The book was written in 1991 so it talks about the early signs of this 'beauty obsessed' world and how it came about, it talks about how women are affected by the societies pressure to be beautiful and it is interesting to see what has changed and what has stayed the same between now and then.

The book uses a definition of the 'beauty myth' which i thought was interesting:

Definition of the beauty myth:

Women must want to embody it and men must want to possess women who embody it. This embodiment is an imperative for women and not for men, which situation is necessary and natural because it is biological, sexual, and evolutionary: Strong men battle for beautiful women, and beautiful women are more reproductively successful. Women’s beauty must correlate to their fertility, and since this system is based on sexual selection, it is inevitable and changeless.

In simpler terms what they are trying to say is that woman want to be beautiful and men want to possess women who are beautiful. It is crucial for women but not for men. Strong men battle for beautiful women and beautiful women are generally more successful. Women's beauty must relate to their fertility and since the system is based on sexual selection, it is inevitable and changeless.

What i take from this is that in the early 1900's men played a huge part in the obsession of beauty. The reason women wanted to be beautiful is so that men would take interest in them. This is still a factor today although i feel that society have taken over mens role and become more dominant in the pressures towards women. 

At the start of the book Wolf talks about the issues that women worry about that shouldn't really matter but have become issues due to the pressures on them from society and men. 

she says 'And they can no longer restrict to the subconscious their sense that this lack of freedom has something to do with with apparently frivolous issues, things that really should not matter. Many are ashamed to admit that such trivial concerns—to do with physical appearance, bodies, faces, hair, clothes matter so much.'

Due to these pressures from the media, society and men the rate in eating disorders started to rise as women became more conscious of their bodies and what they were eating. Although at the same time women were receiving more power due to jobs and the ability to vote, they were getting stronger in one sense but weaker in another. 

'During the past decade, women breached the power structure; meanwhile, eating disorders rose exponentially and cosmetic surgery became the fastest-growing medical specialty. During the past five years, consumer spending doubled, pornography became the main media category, ahead of legitimate films and records combined, and thirty-three thousand American women told researchers that they would rather lose ten to fifteen pounds than achieve any other goal.

It is no accident that so many potentially powerful women feel this way. We are in the midst of a violent backlash against feminism that uses images of female beauty as a political weapon against women’s advancement: the beauty myth'

Wolf then goes on to talk about youth and how youth and virginity (until recently) were seen as beautiful. Women are seen to grow wiser with age and this is intimidating to men therefore older women were seen as 'un-beautiful'. The beauty myth has also made women fearful of each other. Young women fear Older women due to becoming 'less beautiful' although wiser and older women fear younger women as they are a threat to them as they have youth and are seen as beautiful. The beauty myth effects women for their whole life span, there is no way out. 

'Competition between women has been made part of the myth so that women will be divided from one another. Youth and (until recently) virginity have been “beautiful” in women since they stand for experiential and sexual ignorance. Aging in women is “un- beautiful” since women grow more powerful with time, and since the links between generations of women must always be newly broken: Older women fear young ones, young women fear old, and the beauty myth truncates for all the female life span.'

This has all come about in the past 100 years due to the rise in technology and the images we are exposed to, before the camera there were paintings but before that all women had to go off were each other and to them everybody was beautiful. Now with such a huge emphasis on women in the media it has turned women against each other and to pick out insecurities in each other. 

'Before the development of technologies of mass production—daguerrotypes, photographs, etc.—an ordinary woman was exposed to few such images outside the Church.'

'For the first time new technologies could reproduce—in fashion plates, daguerreotypes, tintypes, and rotogravures—images of how women should look. In the 1840s the first nude photographs of prostitutes were taken; advertisements using images of “beautiful” women first appeared in mid-century'

Everything is continuing to grow and affecting more women and for a fact affecting younger women. Teenage girls are very vulnerable and now from such a young age are exposed to such powerful and harsh critiques of how they should be, look, dress etc. 

'And the unconscious hallucination grows ever more influential and pervasive because of what is now conscious market manipulation: powerful industries—the $33-billion-a-year diet industry, the $20-billion cosmetics industry, the $300-million cosmetic surgery industry, and the $7-billion pornography industry—have arisen from the capital made out of unconscious anxieties, and are in turn able, through their influence on mass culture, to use, stimulate, and reinforce the hallucination in a rising economic spiral.'

'Why does the social order feel the need to defend itself by evading the fact of real women, our faces and voices and bodies, and reducing the meaning of women to these formulaic and endlessly reproduced “beautiful” images?'

'An ideology that makes women feel “worth less” was urgently needed to counteract the way feminism had begun to make us feel worth more'

It is clear where all of this came from. Feminism and women fighting for their power, the government have given them that power but have now decided to degrade them in a different way. Through making themselves feel worthless and not good enough. It has definitely worsened since the beauty myth was written but i hope that now we are all aware of the effects it is having on women and young girls we will all be able to help stop it.

Revisiting my proposal

I wanted to take a look back at my proposal from Advanced Research Strategies and see what has changed and how this project has progressed.

My Introduction/ Research Statement...

'The theme of my idea is that women/models feel drowned by society and the pressures to look a certain way and be somebody your not. I want to do in depth research into this and get responses from real women around me and use their views to aid my project.

I want to use these responses to shape the style and form of each image, so if one response is that a women feels drowned by the pressures to look a certain way I could use the underwater idea for that but I will not solely base the project on 'underwater photography'. I feel this will work a lot better as a whole series of images all underwater could get boring for the viewer and the difference in responses would not be as clear. I could maybe ask a simple question such as 'describe in one word the way the media/society makes you feel about yourself as a women?' and use those singular words to illustrate each image.

I also like the idea of re-enacting popular images in the media that make these women feel under pressure by portraying how these images make women feel.

I want to achieve a series of images which will be displayed in a gallery or a magazine.'

The idea of the women/models has changed as i am now focusing on teenage girls aged between 14 and 18 years old. Through the survey i have accomplished getting real responses from my target audience and they have heavily aided and influenced my project.

I still want to use the singular words to form each image although this has formed difficult. By using props etc to stylise the words into the photographs so for example 'Drowned' being underwater, it was commented on that this would be too literal. Because of this i have decided to take a more subtle approach and photograph the girls in their bedrooms. Your bedroom says a lot about you and your feelings as it is a very personal space. Especially in your teenage years you seem to express yourself more on the walls of your bedroom with posters, quotes etc. Even with this i still faced the dilemma of how to incorporate the singular words. As the survey was done anonymous when i asked a couple of the girls which words they used they said they couldn't remember, i think it was more a case of that they didn't want me to know. So i am now stuck with how this can be added in without knowing which girl said which word. 

My aim for the images is still the same and i am thinking about how i want to print and present the images for the final exhibition. 

Survey

After deciding my target audience would be girls aged between 14-18 years old, i wanted to start by creating a survey to get the girls feelings and emotions to certain sides of the media and society. For the survey i decided to ask 10 questions so that i could see what different aspects contribute to the feelings and emotions these teenage girls have towards what they see in the media. i wanted to touch upon who they aspire too, what they feel the media classes as 'beautiful', what they define as beautiful and how the pressures in society make them feel. 

I came up with these ten questions:

1. Who do you think is the most beautiful woman in the world and why?
2. What do you think the media defines as beautiful?
3. What do you define as beautiful?
4. Do you feel confident in your own body?
5. If you had the chance to change your body image, would you?
6. Do you receive a negative or positive vibe from the media about body image? Explain…
7. Describe in one word how the media/society makes you feel?
8. Do you feel influenced by the media on how to look/dress etc?
9. Have you ever been on a diet? if so, why?
10. Have you ever changed your appearance because of something you've seen/read in the media? if so, what did you change and why?

So far, 14 girls have filled out the survey and i wanted to make sure it was just the girls who were going to be in my images that would fill it out so that the survey is relevant to the images. 

Below i will show you some of the responses i received...

1. Who do you think is the most beautiful woman in the world and why?

2. What do you think the media defines as beautiful?

3. What do you define as beautiful?

4. Do you feel confident in your own body?

5. If you had the chance to change your body image, would you?

6. Do you receive a positive or negative vibe from the media/society about body image? Explain...

7. Describe in one word how the media/society makes you feel?

8. Do you feel influenced by the media on how to look/dress etc?

9. Have you ever been on a diet? if so, why?

10. Have you ever changed your appearance because of something you've seen/read in the media? If so, why?