Our ‘self’ is one of the most fascinating things that we have the privilege of exploring, and, arguably, the camera is the best tool in order to do so. While the #selfie might be an in-recent-years social media phenomenon, women have been pioneering the self-portrait for decades. Dutch artist Hester Scheurwater uses the medium of the image to challenge the role of the woman as mere sex object, through the use of props like mirrors – which she uses to juxtapose her inner monologue with her outer appearance.
“I have always felt the urge to stage the self, or myself,” she says. “By staging myself as a sex object, not in a way as seen by others but in a self-directed and a self-chosen pose, I shoot back at the way women are shown as sex objects in a fake way. I want to use a rawness and realness in the images by using my own body and ‘kinks’. Like Sacha Grey liked to say, ‘In our society, we use sex to sell everything’. Everything! We use it to sell sneakers, and microwave meals. It’s okay to show your tits, but it’s not okay to talk about what your ‘kinks’ are when you’re a woman.’ I try, almost obsessively, to comply with this image through self-portraiture. These fantasy images are reminiscent of desires, fears, temptation, seduction, violence and sex – self-images as sex objects, devoid of any commercial frills; knowing full well that I can never compete or live up to the image.”
Inspired by artists like Claude Cahun, Cindy Sherman, Francesca Woodman and Egon Schiele, Scheurwater explains, “From my early years I have always had a special interest and curiosity in work of artists using sexually loaded themes or artists working with self-portrait, but also by the pornographic poses and commercial images that surround us.”
On the question of what differentiates porn from art, she muses, “It’s a difficult question because everything can be art and as soon as a conceptual artist says porn is art, it is art. For me, the difference is that porn is made for sexual stimulation, and, from a commercial point of view, while art and in particular my art, is not. I am aware that the poses in my work have a strong connection to porn poses.”
“Facebook is all about looking and being looked at. You are given access to the lives of others and, in turn, you are encouraged to share details of your own private life. But it is also very much about what is permitted and what is not” – Hester Scheurwater
Using Facebook as a key platform, in 2009 she began to upload daily self-portraits of herself as ‘a sex object’, raising issues and concerns with the infiltration of social media in our lives. “It was an ongoing art project in the digital public space – the word selfie did not yet exist,” she reveals. “Facebook is all about looking and being looked at. You are given access to the lives of others and, in turn, you are encouraged to share details of your own private life. But it is also very much about what is permitted and what is not. You have to comply to standards of behaviour in order to remain part of the community. People present themselves in a way that’s socially acceptable – they stage themselves. In this sense, it gives the illusion of truth and openness while it involves a great deal of coercion and performance. And this was the very reason that I chose Facebook, I was publicising a set of overtly exhibitionistic self-portraits on a platform that was all about voyeurism and exhibitionism as forms of social control. By doing so, I was testing the boundaries of the new medium and its users. I wanted to explore the voyeuristic and exhibitionistic nature of the social media. Besides, I was interested in the issue of online social control. I find it very comparable to traditional forms of social control.”
Ultimately, through her work, Scheurwater wants to showcase the extent of a woman’s power, alongside herself as a woman of such power. “The questions of who is looking and how a woman has to present herself in order to be seen as one, has been a recurring issue in my work. In the self-portrait series, I was trying in an almost compulsive way to question the contemporary codes of femininity as we a see them in all sorts of advertisements. These codes define women as fake sex objects and link a woman’s identity with a male point of view of sexuality. I try to appropriate these clichés of the ‘sensual, seductive’ woman and flip them on their head. I take them in, chew them, and spit them out again. In that sense I hope my work can make people aware of the gender related issues about sexuality. Sex is the woman’s domain, we have to gain it back. I have difficulties with art criticism that deals with art made today using criteria and ways of looking from the past. Women artists working nowadays seem to keep on being judged on the basis of ideas that were popular in the 1970s, but that are now obsolete. It puts women in the role of the victims. The emphasis shouldn’t be put on women’s oppression but rather on their strength.”
HERE THE LINK: http://www.dazeddigital.com/photography/article/26397/1/hester-scheurwater-can-women-regain-power-through-the-self-portrait
Cinema was born in 1895. In 2015, the original device has disappeared – such is the world, techniques vanish and others emerge: “There is no doubt that death is the youth of the world.”* I initiated my cinematic research at a transitional moment, in 1990, and started to present it in 1992. In 1993 in Washington (USA), I started a series of photographs figuring photograms of films corroded by the passing of time and storage condition, which was exhibited in New York two years later at MoMA. Since then, I have been watching films in Western film libraries and private collections, harvesting “decomposed” images affected by the passing of time. Without retouching them, I select the improbable and rare ones, those on which the marks of time enter in dialogue with the image to the point where it becomes difficult to distinguish between the actual image and its destruction process. Jean Cocteau claimed that cinema filmed “death at work”. It seemed interesting to identify death at work at the core of the medium, within the material and invisible layer allowing us access to the film: the reel. So I ventured through cinema, with great patience – it takes fifteen days, eight hours a day, to watch a feature film frame-by-frame –, reflecting upon the instability of film archives, their support, the conditions of their appearance and disappearance (I was far from imagining that the proper reel could vanish!). I fancy the idea that figures and locations filmed a century ago resurface differently at other times and that I was able to capture this hazardous encounter with the ills affecting the medium. Furthemore, the fact that these images exhale beauty, strangeness and intensity is a nice complement: grace befalls anywhere.
Eric Rondepierre
* In Georges Bataille, L’Histoire de l’érotisme, Œuvres Complètes, Tome VIII, Paris, Gallimard, 1976.
Limited edition of 250 copies with an 15,3 x 18,5 cm C Print signed by the author. Hard cover, size 210mm x 280mm, on printing!
Le cinéma est né en 1895. En 2015, son dispositif original n’est plus parmi nous, ainsi va le monde, une technique meurt, une autre apparaît : « la mort assurément est la jeunesse du monde »[1]. Ma recherche prend place dans un moment de transition puisque je commence mon travail sur le cinéma en 1990 et que je commence à le montrer en 1992. C’est en 1993, à Washington (USA), que j’initie une série de photographies montrant des photogrammes de film corrodées par le temps, les conditions de stockage. Deux ans après je les expose au MoMA de New-York. Depuis lors, je visionne des films dans les cinémathèques occidentales et les collections privées, prélève des images « décomposées » sans les retoucher. Je choisis celles, rares et improbables, où l’empreinte du temps dialogue avec l’image de telle façon qu’il devient parfois difficile de savoir où s’arrête l’image proprement dite et où commence le travail de sa destruction. Jean Cocteau disait que le cinéma filmait « la mort au travail ». Il m’a paru intéressant de repérer ce travail de la mort au sein même du medium, dans la couche matérielle et invisible qui nous permet d’y avoir accès : la pellicule. C’est avec une longue patience que j’ai été conduit à parcourir le cinéma en tout sens (voir un long-métrage image par image prend 15 jours à raison de 8h/Jour), à réfléchir sur la précarité des archives de film, leur support, leur conditions d’apparition, et de disparition (j’étais loin de penser que la pellicule elle-même disparaitrait !). Que des figures et des lieux filmés depuis un siècle puissent refaire surface sous un autre visage et en d’autres temps n’est pas fait pour me déplaire. Que j’ai pu fixer leur rencontre hasardeuse avec les maladies qui affectent leur support me satisfait pleinement. Que ces images aient une beauté, une étrangeté et une force est de surcroit : la grâce tombe où elle veut.
Eric Rondepierre
[1] La phrase est de Georges Bataille, L’Histoire de l’érotisme, O.C. VIII, Paris, Gallimard, 1976
Limited edition of 250 copies with an 15,3 x 18,5 cm C Print signed by the author. Hard cover, size 210mm x 280mm, on printing!
The Bespoke Collection, The N°1 with the artist Eric Rondepierre will be ready soon! Because Editions Bessard is always in movement I’ll stop the Zine Collection at the number 30. “In Hoc Libra Vinces” its my new concept! Size of the PhotoBook 210mm X 280mm 24 pictures + cover, hard cover in cloth. Limited edition of 250 copies with a signed C Print signed by the author. Success and long life to the new collection BeSpoke ! Translation by Frederique Destribats
Logo of the new Bespoke Collection, The N°1 will be ready soon!. Because Éditions Bessard is always in movement I’ll stop the Zine Collection at the number 30. “In Hoc Libra Vinces” its my new concept! Size of the PhotoBook 210mm X 280mm 24 pictures + cover, hard cover in cloth. Limited edition of 250 copies with a signed C Print signed by the author. Success and long life to the new collection BeSpoke ! With Éditions Bessard
Lago di Como, Cernobbio, Hotel Villa D’Este, Walking in the garden with the Zine Collection N°23 “Dear Slut” by the Turkish female photographer Eylül Aslan. Have you got you copy?
Lago di Como, Cernobbio, Hotel Villa D’Este, Aperitif Proseco with the Zine Collection N°5 “Scheme” by the photographer from Ukraine Roman Pyatkovka. Have you got you copy?
In the French Alps: Glacier of Argentière Chamonix Mont-Blanc, Haute-Savoie Lucie Beudet Zine Collection N°17 “Selfeet” climbing the Alps. Have you got your copy?
In the Alps Chamonix Mont-Blanc, Haute-Savoie, france. Robin Hammond Zine Collection N9 “Zimbabwe” in the frog and cloud this afternoon. Have you got your copy?
