UDTR Global Rights of Nature Radar

Women's Camera Work: Seven Propositions in Search of a Theory

Identification

Public canonical key

doi:10.1017/s036123330000449x

Authors

Judith

Reported year

1991

Reported language

en · eng

Source type

Article

First detected

2026-11-09T19:10:37.324924+00:00

Last metadata observation

2026-11-09T19:10:37.324924+00:00

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Not checked

Documentary abstract — original language

Anaked woman stands before an artist seated in front of his easel, the elegance of his hat and frock coat, his little Vandyke beard somewhat anachronistic for 1914 (Figure 1). Light molds the back of the woman's body, outlining her outstretched right arm and her bent right leg, accenting her discarded dress draped over the seat of the chair. The shadows, the dark places of her body, echo the partial covering of the representation of nature that hangs like a sign on the screen on the wall behind her. All of the conventions of the artist's studio are here, from the black-and-white tiles to the linking of woman both with nature and pet; but this is a photograph, and it documents without irony certain institutions and practices - a form of representation — that dominated “art” photography at the turn of the century. The tradition upon which this photograph, The Artist and His Model (1914) by Richard Polack, draws, and the ideology to which it subscribes, has to do with notions of power. The light that idealizes, the gaze that possesses, are not always gentle, as Foucault suggests, but sometimes as penetrating as the surgeon's knife. The context for photographs like this one would include Eadweard Muybridge's studies of “the geometry of bodies” of 1887, a series of figures in motion called Animal Locomotion (Figure 2), as well as a whole range of representations of naked human bodies, from what Martha Banta calls the “soft porn” of Clarence White's and Alfred Stieglitz's “genteel ‘art photography’” to E. J. Bellocq's photographs of Storyville prostitutes to anatomical documentary studies for ethnographic, military, and medical purposes.

Identifiers

DOI

10.1017/s036123330000449x

OPENAIRE

doi_dedup___::ae8eddfa38a17c173399c4e2cebf6b99

Documentary context

Documentary family

Scholarship

Source-reported types

Article

Entity mentions are not evidence of legal recognition. Jurisdiction studied is separate from author affiliation country.

Sources

OpenAIRE · Record 1

• DOI · https://doi.org/10.1017/s036123330000449x

Documentary status

Relevance pending

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