Archive for the ‘Photography of the Body’ tag
Laurel Nakadate’s Controlled Voyeurism
Laurel Nakadate, Oops!, 2000
The noughties are commonly described as a decade in which celebrity culture proliferated, a decade which saw a massive increase in the commodification of sexualized imagery, also the decade of voyeurism via TV shows such as Big Brother. The American video artist and photographer Laurel Nakadate, born in 1975 and raised in Iowa, is an artist of the noughties. Seemingly engrossed with artifacts of popular culture, her earliest work Oops! from 2000 is a witty homage to Britney Spears’ classic hit Oops! I did it again – the music video of which caused a huge scandal for depicting Spears as not-so-innocent school girl. Nakadate meanwhile practiced and memorized Spears’ dance moves from the video and re-enacted them while filming herself with complete strangers – all of whom are single, white, middle-aged and rather unkept looking men. Crucially, the filming took place in the men’s homes while Nakadate appears to have deliberately positioned herself as vulnerable subject in their company. While Nakadate dances away to Britney Spears in a tight pink top, one men stand still, another awkwardly wiggles to the music, while another man mimics the artist’s movement. The resulting artwork split on three video screens makes for uncomfortable viewing.
Laurel Nakadate, Oops!, 2000
Nakadate clearly lays out a powerful set of dichotomies in this work: the young, female artist, blessed with youthfully good looks, juxtaposes herself (and her body) against older men, apparently drifters or social outcast as the smudgy looking interiors of their homes might indicate. Nakadate’s well-practiced dance moves also clash with the men’s awkward bodies – an awkwardness further emphasized by the presence of the camera. Another important dichotomy in Oops!, and in much of Nakadate’s later work, is the notion of control: who is controlling whom, who is dominating whom, even, who is exploiting whom? It appears that despite purposefully situating herself and her body into a vulnerable position, emulating stereotypical depictions of gender such as Lolita, Nakadate is fully in charge of what is happening. She is the one with the camera thus ultimately in control what is being filmed and edited, she is the visual artist who is trained in what ‘type’ of imagery she is looking for, and lastly, despite depending on the understanding and hospitality of complete strangers, she is ultimately also in control of what subjects she wishes to perform her video with. As a result of deconstructing and inversing this complex power dynamic, the viewer, too, is asked to submit him or herself to Nakadate’s visual game.
Laurel Nakadate, Good Morning Sunshine, 2009
In more recent works, Nakadate continues to explore notions of gender, voyeurism and control. With the help of the internet and social networking (another byproduct of the noughties) Nakadate posted an open casting call for young women in Syracuse, New York. The purposefully crude and shaky video footage in Good Morning Sunshine again makes for uncomfortable viewing as Nakadate’s intrusive camera enters the young women’s bedrooms who responded to the casting call. Like the men in Oops!, the women appear to have been, in one way or the other, quite carefully selected as they encapsulate a melange of teenage anxiety and innocence.
Laurel Nakadate, Good Morning Sunshine, 2009
Nakadate further heightens the sense of anxiety by intruding on the girls’ personal space and giving them instructions as to what to do in front of the camera. Totally submitting themselves to Nakadate’s demands, the filming ends as each of the girls undress to their underwear. A teddy bear in one of the girl’s beds acts as a sign that Nakadate is trodding on dangerous territory in this work. While, on one hand, her subject’s appear innocent, on the other hand, the intrusion of the camera, the verbal instructions and the crude video footage situate Good Morning Sunshine in a visual aesthetic more commonly found in amateur pornography. Here too, despite not actually being in the frame itself, Nakadate’s body is part of the work as the shaky handheld camera refers to a corporeality beyond the frame of the video.
Laurel Nakadate, 365 Days, A Catalogue of Tears, 2010
In 365 Days, A Catalogue of Tears, Nakadate photographed herself crying for every day in 2010. The photographs are displayed in grid formation creating a large montage of imagery that usually needs to be separated on several walls. Despite the large and potentially overwhelming amount of images, a browse through the work reveals a number of elements fairly quickly: in every photograph Nakadate is alone, in most of the photographs she occupies a private space, while her solitude and withdrawal from society is emphasized by dark and sometimes grainy printing techniques. On closer inspection it also becomes apparent that many photographs were taken in anonymous and alienating spaces. A courtesy bottle of water in a hotel room, a sign that indicates where the towels are located in an airplane toilet, the clinical interior of a waiting room – these are the signifiers of a transient existence. Nakadate’s ‘catalogue of tears’ is thus also a catalogue of America as she seemingly traverses the country in the pursuit of her art.
Laurel Nakadate, 365 Days, A Catalogue of Tears, 2010
While Nakadate stopped short in asking her subjects to completely undress for the camera in Good Morning Sunshine, in 365 Days she routinely exhibits her naked body. By integrating windows, reflections and mirrors in her self-portraits, Nakadate is also referencing the very act of looking: that she is looking at herself and that the viewer is looking at her. Here, Nakadate also appears to borrow techniques from cinema, not only in the aesthetic construction of the image but also in the way the images are consumed: the hundreds of photographs viewed at a quick browse evokes the crude viewing experience of flicking through a thumb cinema. To a degree, by turning the camera on herself, Nakadate’s voyeuristic and investigative gaze functions as a commentary on the unyielding search for identity in an age that is over-saturated with images.
Laurel Nakadate: 365 Days: A Catalogue of Tears is available as book. Other recommendations can be found in our online bookshop.
The Many Bodies of Yurie Nagashima
Yurie Nagashima, Kazoku, 1993
In a previous blog post, I wrote about the photographer Yurie Nagashima whose photographs of herself and her family in the nude instigated a dramatic shift in Japanese visual culture. After exhibiting her phenomenally successful Kazoku series in 1993, Nagashima continued to interrogate photographic subjects related to gender, sexuality, representation and the body.
Yure Nagashima, Onion Boob and Sarah Lucas, Self-portrait with Fried Eggs, 1996
In one photograph, she holds an onion in front of her left breast while holding her t-shirt up by her teeth. This form of visual allegory and humorous photographic intervention locates Nagashima alongside artists such as Sarah Lucas who, in one photograph, placed two fried eggs in situ of her breasts. In the case of Lucas, the reference to female fertility and reproductive organs signified by the eggs is clear. In Nagashima’s case however, the onion is more difficult to locate since it does not immediately signify either the male or the female body. Instead, the onion might refer to the trope of perfectibility: the emphasis on aesthetic perfection of fruit and vegetable that is common in Japanese department stores. The perfect watermelon, the perfect carrot, the perfect onion, is, above all, determined by its symmetrical and even visual appearance. Nagashima’s photograph appears to question, even ridicule, this paradigm closely associated with consumerism and the representation of gender. Here, I am referring to consumerism in an economic sense but also consuming food as metaphor for consuming the female body. The onion thus functions as a pun on consuming and being consumed: in contrast to the soothing milk of the mother’s breast, Nagashima purposefully chooses a vegetable known not only for it’s acidic taste, but also, for causing tears. The unpeeling of the onion, and the allegorical pain associated with it, becomes the complete antithesis to the warmth associated with the mother.
Another photograph in which she has painted her breasts in the shape of two cartoon characters suggests that Nagashima’s preferred subject is her own body. Here, the body is not a neutral canvas or a corporeal ground zero, rather, the body functions as a potentially humorous even uncontrollable form explored by the camera. The physical act of taking a self-portrait is more closely located within the realm of performance art as Nagashima interrogates a corporeal and spatial interior by turning the camera on herself. In other words, the intervention takes places in Nagashima’s personal sphere via her body, while the camera acts as documentary device. Similar to the onion photograph, the cartoon characters serve as a visual pun that also acts to defamiliarize body parts. The cartoon characters have the effect of setting the photograph off from the classical iconography of the Nude and enabling it instead to act as asignifier for specific bodily functions. The defamiliarization of body parts also acts to desexualize the body as a whole. This visual methodology is perhaps most apparent in This Time, where Nagashima makes another direct gender specific reference to a bodily function. In his concept of the ‘grotesque body’, the literary critic Mikhail Bakhtin argued that references to bodily excrement can act as a powerful device to invert a hegemonic social order. The allegorical blood on the floor situates the body outside of stereotypical representations of the body in mass media, consumer culture or pornography, placing it instead within a discourse of necessity and privacy.
Yurie Nagashima, This Time
It is ironic that as much Nagashima explores narratives of private life in her photographs, she was herself in the meantime turned into a celebrity figure in Japan. For a period of time in the mid-1990s, newspapers, magazines, TV chat shows, and the so-called ‘wide shows’, relentlessly pursued Nagashima in hopes of featuring the up-and-coming artist in their programming. With the emergence of a number of women photographers in a relatively short time period, from 1993 until about 1996, critics referred to Nagashima as a leader of a ‘girl photography boom’. Nagashima fiercely sought to distance herself from this label and, in the process, became critical of the media attention that her work has provoked.
Yurie Nagashima, Red Undwear
In as much Nagashima appears to engage in the pleasure of looking and being looked at in her photographic series Kazoku, in more recent photographs Nagashima’s gaze back to the spectator is noticeably absent. In one photograph, Nagashima’s back is literally turned towards the spectator. Viewed within the context of Nagashima’s resistance towards the increasing media attention, this gesture signifies her growing desire to be left unmediated. Even if this photograph relates to Nagashima turning away from the camera, from representation, from our gaze, she is still using her body to communicate this message. By performing to the camera, by deconstructing socially constructed gender identities, and by becoming object as much as subject of her photographs, the many bodies of Yurie Nagashima have reset the parameters of photographic discourse in her native Japan.
Please also read my post The Family Photos of Yurie Nagashima.
If you are interested in Japanese photography, please download my essay:
Marco Bohr (2011). ‘Are-Bure-Boke: Distortions in Late 1960s Japanese Cinema and Photography’. Dandelion Journal. Vol. 2, No. 2.
The Family Photos of Yurie Nagashima
Yurie Nagashima, from the Kazoku series, 1993
In 1993, at the age of 20, Yurie Nagashima received the Urbanart award hosted by the Parco Gallery in Tokyo for a series of photographs which would define her artistic practice until today. In her series Kazoku, or Family, Nagashima photographed herself along with her parents and brother – all of whom are naked. At the time, Nagashima’s family photographs were celebrated for pushing the boundaries of socially and culturally constructed taboos as much as they were derided for being obscene.
A reading of a photograph of Nagashima and her father playing golf on an indoor putting green helps to identify some of the aspects which caused this polarized reception of her work. As her father is concentrating on hitting the ball, Nagashima looks straight into the camera, her legs and body are positioned like a player reading the green on an actual golf course. Instead of concentrating in her father’s game, Nagashima looks at the camera, and by extension, at the viewer in order to underline that this exchange of gazes is one of the main subjects in this photograph. In other words, the image is not about playing golf, but it’s about looking and being looked at. Here I am primarily referring to an exchange of gazes between Nagashima and the spectator of the photograph. Indeed, this is a characteristic that runs throughout most of the photographs in the Kazoku series, Nagashima looks dispassionately at the viewer, almost as if to gage his or her reaction. Yet the golf photograph stands out because a third gaze, the father’s gaze, adds to the complexity of the image. The taboo that Nagashima addresses in this work is not the spectator seeing her naked, but rather, the possibility of her being seen naked by members of her family.
The golf photograph also addresses questions regarding gender and sexuality. While holding the golf club in between her legs, Nagashima not only disguises parts of her body, she also alludes to the golf club as phallic signifier. Here, the golf club as phallus also signifies power: in the photograph, it is the father who actively hits the ball, while Nagashima passively looks to the camera. The complete inversion of the strict dress code required on most golf courses suggests that, even in this very early photographic series, Nagashima targets socially constructed norms in society.
Yurie Nagashima, from the Kazoku series, 1993
In the Kazoku series, Nagashima’s preferred methodology is to insert the unexpected into images that are otherwise stereotypical forms of photographic representation. Apart from the subjects’ nudity, the group photograph of the Nagashima family for instance is strongly reminiscent of a standard family photograph. In what appears to be the living room, the parents are sitting in the front row, while Nagashima and her brother are kneeling in the back, as they all look straight into the camera. The mother sits in the customary seiza-style position as her hands are folded in her lap – a position expected of a woman even while dressed. Another reference to the family photo is the curtain in the background evoking the backdrop of a photo studio. On top of the subjects’ lack of clothing, the photograph also reveals very few objects that might help to situate the family in a social class. The barreness of their surroundings is mirrored by the bare bodies of the family members in the photograph. Instead, what Nagashima wishes the viewer to focus on is the structure of the family, the resemblance of family members, the representation of hierarchies within the family and also, the family being the first place where gender differences and asymmetry are socially defined.
Maki Miyashita, Rooms and Underwear, 1998
In 1993, when Kazoku project was first exhibited, Nagashima was at the forefront of a new generation of women photographers. At the time, Kazoku redefined the parameters of contemporary Japanese photography and Nagashima was heralded as a pioneer in her field. A number of photographers make direct or indirect references to Nagashima early photographic work. In the photographic series ‘Rooms and Underwear’ (1998) for instance, photographer Maki Miyashita borrows from Nagashima’s trope of combining the (partially) naked subject within a representation of domestic surroundings. In his series ‘For I Am the Mother and I Am the Daughter’ (2002), Noritoshi Hirakawa creates a mise-en-scène that is visually extremely similar to Nagashima’s family group photograph. Except in Hirakawa’s case, he asked mothers to switch their role with their daughters, while disavowing the presence of the male subject completely. Indeed, Nagashima herself returned to the subject matter of Kazoku in a series of photographs in which she asked different groupings of unrelated and unacquainted subjects to pose for her like in a family portrait. The result is an assemblage of strangers who, in the format of the studio photograph, convincingly appear like members of the same family.
Noritoshi Hirakawa, from ‘For I Am the Mother and I Am the Daughter’, 2002
Yurie Nagashima, Family Portraits, 2002
Yurie Nagashima’s Kazoku instigated a shift in photographic discourse in Japan: away from the male dominated field of street photography associated with Daido Moriyama, or the quasi-pornographic representation of women associated with Nobuyoshi Araki, to a more internally oriented narratives of private moments. While it may not have been Nagashima herself who single-handedly caused this shift in Japanese visual culture, she nevertheless represents part of a dramatic change that allowed women photographers to become active participants in a sign economy. Nagashima set the tone for a new generation of photographers, many of them women, emerging throughout the 1990s in Japan.
Please also read my post The Many Bodies of Yurie Nagashima.
If you are interested in Japanese photography, please download my essay:
Marco Bohr (2011). ‘Are-Bure-Boke: Distortions in Late 1960s Japanese Cinema and Photography’. Dandelion Journal. Vol. 2, No. 2.
