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Gender and sexuality

Gender and sexuality are big parts of a person's identity, they can effect the way you look, act and what you love. They can define a person but also restrict them, there is stigma, stereotypes and negative connotation with certain identifications. I plan on looking into feminine and masculine genders, sexuality and attempt to depict stigma being broken. Finally i will look into completely stripping a person of their gender. 

Barbra Kruger

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For this section of my journey i will look again at the work of Barbra Kruger, this time regarding a more contraversal topic.Currently I am looking into the personal aspects of a person, for now looking at gender. I would like to use a mixture of text and images to create a purposeful design.  I want to showcase the way men are oppressed in aspects of appearances, defying what is considered taboo for a man to wear and exploring the toxic masculinity of todays society.  I want to make my photos clear and promenade, which I feel I can achieve with the influence of Kruger.  

Toxic Masculinity
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The images above depict subtle messages going against the gender normality in society. The images feature a male subject interacting with object connotated with feminine nature. Each image is in black and white for a soft dramatic feel, with a delicate vignette surrounding the images. The message about how it is okay to battle toxic masculinity is not overplayed which emphasise how normal a man acting feminine should be. In a way, these images could have been stronger if i had experiment with adding delicate typography associated with toxic masculinity. 

subjected to Gender

In this section of my journey i have now focused on two people, male and female. I positioned them in front of a white background with tungsten lighting for clarity, for clean detail. Both wear the same jackets to bring the similarities between them, but left their faces unchanged, for now, to express the differences.

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Combining 

For the next part, i decided to try three ways in distorting and combining the photos to show the complexity of gender and to compare. First i took inspiration from Diane Meyer, a photographer that approaches images with mixed media intensions. Meyer uses cross stitches to sew into photos, creating a 'pixel' effect. The images range from people to places, and Mayer turns them into complex puzzles of colour and shapes. Typically she jumbles up faces, stripping them of features and making them beyond recognition.  The images create a sense of confusement  and fuzziness of the mind, i want to take my own images and recreate this atmosphere of complexicity for gender. 

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My work
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Inspired by the mixed media done by Diane Meyer, i used the two images of the the subjects firstly to create a joiner image, seen on the left. The reason behind this image was to show feminine features on a male model, mixing the two genders. This image could have been stronger if more features were placed on top of the original. Next i moved on to create two collages, using the gender shoot images as well as magazine cuttings. This was to represent the pressing need for feminine beauty within magazine, and the overpowering dominance of white women within media's beauty world. Finally i wanted to combine the two subjects more strongly than my first joiner attempt. To do this i weaved the two images together to create one. All of these images look best in physical form and can be found in my mixed media book. 

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Steven Groobert

Groobert focus in many of his images is identity, his most notorious being his collection called "Gender X". The photos completely strip the person of almost all of their noticeable features, taking away their gender. The photos give off an atmosphere of silence due to the lack of emotion in the subject and emit a serious tone to emphasise the statement he is trying to convey. I really like the harmony of colour (the material wrapped around the subject and the background.) which gives me a calm feeling possible expressing that gender issues do not need to be hectic. The idea of being stripped is a powerful statement since everyday life in the present seems to rely on gender heavily from the clothes you wear to the way you act. I also want to covey this statement in my own work. 

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Hidden by colour
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In this last section on gender i have explored a mixed media way (Paint) and a Photoshop was of hiding features on the subjects.I feel in the last shoot the contrast was interesting, and attention was drawn to the featureless boxes through the use of colour. Between the shoots i prefer the painted ones, the texture of the paint is so much more expressive than the smoothness of the Photoshop boxes. The purpose of this shoot was to strip the gender of the subject and leave the viewer to make assumptions and guesses. Gender is something more than appearance, when taken away the identity becomes bare, whether your a boy, a girl, in between or something more, gender is apart of your identity and it cannot be taken away from you.

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