Women in Photography

For this week's lecture, we talked about women in photography. Before I had really not thought about how much of a different gender has in who is taking the picture. We started off and looked at pictures that famous female photographers had taken. This is something that we did every photo class last year. I did not really understand what the point was since I had seen most of them before. I also did not notice the difference between how boys and girls took pictures in my class. It did not hit me until we started talking as a group after the slideshow that there actually was sort of a pattern how boys and girls take pictures. For instance, Mr. Oxton said during the lecture that it was very common that females took pictures of other females lightly clothed or in underwear to tell a story. Another common “subject” for females are children. These are something that males never did, as they took mostly pictures of landscapes. I sort of confirmed this, by looking at what kind of pictures I had saved on my computer and yes, it was pretty much only landscapes or non-human objects.

Mr. Oxton used an example to show the difference, in the professional photography world, how men and women take pictures of women differently. He showed us how men and women took pictures of the French actress Isabelle Huppert. In the pictures men took of Huppert she was often objectified and sexualized, with the male gaze was strongly present. While women took pictures of Huppert that expressed emotion and often tried to tell a story.

With the increased knowledge/awareness since this class started, it was not a surprise to me at all when Mr. Oxton showed us who Nikon had asked to promote its new D850 camera. It was all men. I had thought that photography would be more of an equal playing field for men and women since the gender is not attached to the pictures the photographer captures, but clearly, I was wrong. This was also expressed in the New York Times article: Highlighting Women in Photojournalism, where it said in the first paragraph how an editor had told a female photographer ‘that hiring a woman was like “hiring half a person.”’ I do not understand why it matters to people who take the picture. When hiring someone it should never be about the gender, color or sexuality of the person, especially when the job is something as raw as taking pictures.