.com Review
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Each of the extraordinary portraits made by
photographer Annie Leibovitz for her book Women stands on its
own. Looked at together, these "photographs of people with
nothing more in common than that they are women (and living in
America at the end of the twentieth century), all--well almost
all--fully clothed," writes Susan Sontag in the book's preface,
form "an anthology of destinies and disabilities and new
possibilities." Leibovitz, who in her years working for Rolling
Stone, Vogue, and Vanity Fair magazines has photographed hundreds
of celebrities, turns her lens on a wide range of ordinary and
extraordinary female subjects: coal miners, socialites, first
ladies, artists, domestic-violence victims, an astronaut, a
surgeon, a maid. What she creates is a reflection of contemporary
American womanhood that mirrors both women's accomplishments and
the challenges they still face individually and as a group.
Leibovitz demonstrates her own range as a photographer in this
body of work, shooting in the studio and natural settings and
working in both black-and-white and color film. She depicts model
Jerry Hall wearing a little black dress, a fur coat, and high
heels, staring frankly at the viewer from a velvet chair in a
plush red parlor while her naked infant son nurses from her
exposed right . Schoolteacher Lamis Srour's eyes--the only
part of her face visible behind her heavy black veil--illuminate
a dark black-and-white portrait. Leibovitz frames actress
Elizabeth Taylor and her dog Sugar by their shocks of snow-white
hair. She captures four Kilgore College Rangerettes, a drill
team, at the apex of their kicks--white-booted legs pointing up,
obscuring their faces and revealing the red underpants beneath
their blue miniskirts. There are many more wonderful and
unexpected images here, over 200 in all. The delight in
discovering them awaits readers. --Jordana Moskowitz
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From School Library Journal
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-To look upon the faces of the women photographed in
this collection of more than 200 portraits is to marvel at and
admire the intensity and dignity of the personalities
represented. The subjects depicted encompass every imaginable
field of endeavor. There are aerialists, writers, coal miners,
battered women, and socialites, to name a few. They range from
anonymous to well known. Leibovitz has become a celebrity in her
own right since starting her career at Rolling Stone and then
moving on to work at Vogue and Vanity Fair. She is well known for
her photographs of some of the icons of 20th-century culture-rock
stars, movie stars, politicians, athletes, and novelists, as well
as many other famous figures, often posing her subjects in
unconventional and surprising ways. Sontag's thought-provoking
essay gives further in and explanation. Young adults will be
inspired, challenged, and moved both by the accomplishments and
situations of the women photographed, as well as by the skill and
eye of the artist who captured their images.
Turid Teague, Fairfax County Public Library, VA
Copyright 2000 Reed Business Information, Inc.
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From Library Journal
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By now, Liebovitz is famous for her many portraits
of celebrities and public figures in magazines such as Vanity
Fair and Vogue. Time and again she cleanly captures the "story"
of people who are perhaps too much in the camera's eye. Her work,
however, is not limited to those seemingly commanding presences.
Here many portraits of famous women (such as a heroic Toni
Morrison, a perfectly authentic Martha Stewart, and a sexy Jerry
Hall suckling her son Gabriel Jagger) are combined with
Liebovitz's less well known but entirely interesting portraits of
obscure women. She elicits a sort of surprising honesty from
these less-practiced models. The most striking include a direct
glance from Morgan W. Kelly, a young, well-chalked teacher in
South Bronx; a series of paired portraits of Las Ve showgirls
in costume (color) and in daily life (black-and-white); and the
cleverly juxtaposed dual portrait of two gently shy, and obese,
women in front of a pick-up truck followed by one of two young
girls in the back of that truck displaying their Barbie dolls.
Sontag's essay on beauty and the role of photography comments on
the changing status of women in America while challenging the
viewer really to see this amazing array of photographs and
individuals. Recommended for all photography collections.ARebecca
Miller, "Library Journal"
Copyright 1999 Reed Business Information, Inc.
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From Booklist ( /gp/feature.html/?docId=1000027801 )
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The first portrait in Leibovitz's superb gallery of
women is
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From the Inside Flap
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phs by Annie Leibovitz in Women, taken especially
for the book, encompass a broad spectrum of subjects: a rap
artist, an astronaut, two Supreme Court justices, farmers, coal
miners, movie stars, showgirls, rodeo riders, socialites,
reporters, dancers, a maid, a general, a surgeon, the First Lady
of the United States, the secretary of state, a senator, rock
stars, prostitutes, teachers, singers, athletes, poets, writers,
painters, musicians, theater directors, political activists,
performance artists, and businesswomen. "Each of these pictures
must stand on its own," Susan Sontag writes in the essay that
accompanies the portraits. "But the ensemble says, So this what
women are now -- as different, as varied, as heroic, as forlorn,
as conventional, as unconventional as this."
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Excerpt. © Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved.
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Undertake to do a book of photographs of people with
nothing more in common than that they are women (and living in
America at the end of the twentieth century), all-well, almost
all-fully clothed, therefore not the other kind of all-women
picture book ...
Start with no more than a commanding notion of the sheer
interestingness of the subject, especially in view of the
unprecedented changes in the consciousness of many women in these
last decades, and a resolve to stay open to whim and rtunity
...
Sample, explore, revisit, choose, arrange, without cling to
have brought to the page a representative miscellany ...
Even so, a large number of pictures of what is, nominally, a
single subject will inevitably be felt to be representative in
some sense. How much more so with this subject, with this book,
an anthology of destinies and disabilities and new possibilities;
a book that invites the sympathetic responses we bring to the
depiction of a minority (for that is what women are, by every
criterion except the numerical), featuring many portraits of
those who are a credit to their sex. Such a book has to feel
instructive, even if it tells us what we think we already know
about the overcoming of perennial impediments and prejudices and
cultural handicaps, the conquest of new zones of achievement. Of
course, such a book would be misleading if it did not touch on
the bad news as well: the continuing authority of demeaning
stereotypes, the continuing violence (domestic assault is the
leading cause of injuries to American women). Any large-scale
picturing of women belongs to the ongoing story of how women are
presented, and how they are invited to think of themselves. A
book of photographs of women must, whether it intends to or not,
raise the question of women-there
is no equivalent "question of men." Men, unlike women, are not a
work in progress.
Each of these pictures must stand on its own. But the ensemble
says, So this is what women are now-as different, as varied, as
heroic, as forlorn, as conventional, as unconventional as this.
Nobody scrutinizing the book will fall to note the confirmation
of stereotypes of what women are like and the challenge to those
stereotypes. Whether well-known or obscure, each of the nearly
one hundred and seventy women in this album will be looked at
(especially by other women) as models: models of beauty, models
of self-esteem, models of strength, models of transgressiveness,
models of victimhood, models of false consciousness, models of
successful aging.
No book of photographs of men would be interrogated in the same
way.
But then a book of photographs of men would not be undertaken in
the same spirit. How could there be any interest in asserting
that a man can be a stockbroker or a farmer or an astronaut or a
miner? A book of photographs of men with sundry occupations, men
only (without any additional label), would probably be a book
about the beauty of men, men as objects of lustful imaginings to
women and to other men.
But when men are viewed as sex objects, that is not their primary
identity. The traditions of regarding men as, at least
potentially, the creators and curators of their own destinies and
women as objects of male emotions and fantasies (lust,
tenderness, fear, condescension, scorn, dependence), of regarding
an individual man as an instance of humankind and an individual
woman as an instance of . . . women, are still largely intact,
deeply rooted in language narrative, group arrangements, and
family customs. In no language does the pronoun "she" stand for
human beings of both sexes. Women and men are differently
weighted, physically and culturally, with different contours of
selfhood, all presumptively favoring those born male.
I do this, I endure this, I want this ... because I am a woman. I
do that, I endure that, I want that ... even though I'm a woman.
Because of the man dated inferiority of women, their condition as
a cultural minority, there continues to be a debate about what
women are, can be, should want to be. Freud is famously supposed
to have asked, "Lord, what do women want?" Imagine a world in
which it seems normal to inquire, "Lord, what do men want?"...but
who can imagine such a world?
No one thinks the Great Duality is symmetrical-even in America,
noted since the nineteenth century by foreign travelers as a
paradise for uppity women. Feminine and masculine are a tilted
polarity. Equal rights for men has never inspired a march or a
hunger strike. In no country are men legal minors, as women were
until well into the twentieth century in many European countries,
and are still in many Muslim countries, from Morocco to
Afghanistan. No country gave women the right to vote before
giving it to men. Nobody ever thought of men as the second sex.
And yet, and yet: there is something new in the world, starting
with the revoking of age-old legal shackles regarding suffrage,
divorce, property rights. It seems almost inconceivable now that
the enfranchisement of women happened as recently as it did:
that, for instance, women in France and Italy had to wait until
1945 and 1946 to be able to vote. There have been tremendous
changes in women's consciousness, transforming the inner life of
everyone: the sallying forth of women from women's worlds into
the world at large, the arrival of women's ambitions. Ambition is
what women have been schooled to stifle in themselves, and what
is celebrated in a book of photographs that emphasizes the
variety of women's lives today.
Such a book, however much it attends to women's activeness, is
also about women's attractiveness.
Nobody looks through a book of pictures of women without noticing
whether the women are attractive or not.
To be feminine, in one commonly felt definition, is to be
attractive, or to do one's best to be attractive; to attract. (As
being masculine is being strong.) While it is perfectly possible
to defy this imperative, it is not possible for any woman to be
unaware of it. As it is thought a weakness in a man to care a
great deal about how he looks, it is a moral fault in a woman not
to care "enough."
Women are judged by their appearance as men are not, and women
are punished more than men are by the changes brought about by
aging. Ideals of appearance such as, youthfulness and slimness
are in large part now created and enforced by photographic
images. And, of course, a primary interest in having photographs
of well-known beauties to look at over the years is seeing just
how well or badly they negotiate the shame of aging.
In advanced consumer societies, it is said, these "narcissistic"
values are more and more the concern of men as well. But male
primping never loosens the male lock on initiative taking.
Indeed, glorying in one's appearance is an ancient warrior's
pleasure, an expression of power, an instrument of dominance.
Anxiety about personal attractiveness could never be thought
defining of a man: a man can always be seen. Women are looked at.
We assume a world with a boundless appetite for images, in which
people, women and men, are eager to surrender themselves to the
camera. But it is worth recalling that there are parts of the
world where being photographed is something off-limits to women.
In a few countries, where men have been mobilized for a veritable
war against women, women cely appear at all. The imperial
rights of the camera-to gaze at, to record, to exhibit anyone,
anything-are an exemplary feature of modern life, as is the
emancipation of women. And just as the granting of more and more
rights and choices to women s a measure o a societys embrace of
modernity, so the revolt against modernity initiates a rush to
rescind the meager gains toward participation in society on equal
terms with men won by women, mostly urban, educated women, in
previous decades. In many countries struggling with failed or
discredited attempts to modernize, there are more and more
covered women.
The traditional unity of a book of photographs of women is some
ideal of female essence: women gaily displaying their sexual
charms, women veiling themselves behind a look of soulfulness or
primness.
Portraits of women featured their beauty; portraits of men their
"character." Beauty (the province of women) was smooth; character
(the province of men) was rugged. Feminine was yielding, pl,
or plaintive; masculine was forceful, piercing. Men didn't look
wistful. Women, ideally, didn't look forceful.
When in the early 1860s a well-connected, exuberant, middle-aged
Englishwoman named Julia Margaret Cameron took up the camera as a
vocation, she usually photographed men differently than she
photographed women. The men, who included some of the most
eminent poets, sages, and scientists of the Victorian era, were
posed for their portraits. The women-somebody's wife, daughter,
sister, niece-served mostly as models for "fancy sub)ects"
(Cameron's label). Women were used to personify ideals of
womanliness drawn from literature or mythology: the vulnerability
and pathos of Ophelia; the tenderness of the Madonna with her
Child. Almost all the sitters were relatives and friends
reclothed, incarnated several exalted or her parlormaid, who,
suitably icons of femininity. Only Julia Jackson, Cameron's niece
(and the future mother of the future Virginia Woolf), was, in
homage to her exceptional beauty, never posed as anyone but
herself.
What qualified the women as sitters was precisely their beauty,
as fame and achievement qualified the men. The beauty of women
made them ideal subjects. (Notably, there was no role for
picturesque or exotic beauty, so that when Cameron and her
husband moved to Ceylon, she virtually stopped taking pictures.)
Indeed, Cameron defined photography as a quest for the beautiful.
And quest it was: "Why does not Mrs. Smith come to be
photographed?" she wrote to a friend about a lady in London whom
she had never met. "I hear she is Beautiful. Bid her come, and
she shall be made Immortal."
Imagine a book of pictures of women in which none of the women
could be identified as beautiful. Wouldn't we feel that the
photographer had made some kind of mistake? Was being
mean-spirited? Misogynistic? Was depriving us of something that
we had a right to see? No one would say the same thing of a book
of portraits of men.
There were always several kinds of beauty: imperious beauty,
voluptuous beauty, beauty signifying the character traits that
fitted a woman for the confines of genteel domes ticity-do cill
ty, pliancy, serenity. Beauty was not just loveliness of feature
and expression, an aesthetic ideal. It also spoke to the eye
about the virtues deemed essential in women.
For a woman to be intelligent was not essential, not even
particularly appropriate. It was in fact considered disabling,
and likely to be inscribed in her appearance. Such is the e of
a principal character in The Woman in White, Wilkie Collins's
robustly, enthrallingly clever bestseller, which appeared in
1860, just before Cameron started making her portraits. Here is
how this woman is introduced, early in the novel, in the voice of
its young hero:
... I looked from the table to the window farthest from me, and
saw a lady standing at it, with her back turned towards me. The
instant my eyes rested on her, I was struck by the rare beauty of
her form, and by the unaffected grace of her attitude. Her figure
was tall, yet not too tall; comely and well-developed, yet not
; her head set on her shoulders with an easy, pliant firmness;
her waist, perfection in the eyes of a man, for it occupied its
natural place, it filled out its natural circle, it was visibly
and delightfully undeformed by stays. She had not heard my
entrance into the room; and I allowed myself the luxury of
admiring her for a few moments, before I moved one of the chairs
near me, as the least embarrassing means of attracting her
attention. She turned towards me immediately. The easy elegance
of every movement of her limbs and body as soon as she began to
advance from the far end of the room set me in a flutter of
expectation to see her face clearly. She left the window-and I
said to myself, The lady is dark. She moved forward a few
steps-and I said to myself, The lady is young. She approached
nearer-and I said to myself (with a sense of surprise which words
fail me to express), The lady is ugly!
Reveling in the presumptions and delights of the appraising male
gaze, the narrator has noted that, seen from behind and in long
, the lady satisfies all the criteria of female desirability.
Hence his acute surprise, when she turns and comes toward him, at
her "ugly" face (it is not allowed to be just plain or homely),
which, he explains, is a kind of paradox:
Never was the old conventional maxim, that Nature cannot err,
more flatly contradicted-never was the fair promise of a lovely
figure more strangely and startlingly belied by the face and head
that crowned it. The lady's complexion was almost swarthy, and
the dark down on her upper lip was almost a moustache. She had a
large, firm, masculine mouth and jaw; prominent, piercing,
resolute brown eyes; and thick, coal-black hair, growing
unusually low down on her forehead. Her expression-b right,
frank, and intelligent-appeared, while she was silent, to be
altogether wanting in those feminine attractions of gentleness
and pliability, without which the beauty of the handsomest woman
alive is beauty incomplete.
Marian Halcombe will turn out to be the most admirable character
in Collins's novel, awarded every virtue except the capacity to
inspire desire. Moved only by generous, noble sentiments, she has
a near angelic, that is, archetypally femmine, temperament-except
for the troubling matter of her uncommon intelligence, her
frankness, her want of "pliability." Marian Halcombe's body, so
ideally feminine that it is judged ripe for appropriation by a
(presumably male) artist, conveys "modest graces of action." Her
head, her face, signifies something more concentrated,
exacting-unfeminine. The body gives one message, the face
another. And face trumps body-as intelligence, to the detriment
of female sexual attractiveness, trumps beauty. The narrator
concludes:
To see such a face as this set on shoulders that a sculptor would
have longed to model-to be charmed by the modest graces of action
through which the symmetrical limbs betrayed their beauty when
they moved, and then to be almost repelled by the masculine form
and masculine look of the features in which the perfectly shaped
figure ended-was to feel a sensation oddly akin to the helpless
discomfort familiar to us all in , when we recognise yet
cannot reconcile the anomalies and contradictions of a dream.
Collins's male narrator is touching a gender faultline, which
typically arouses anxieties and feelings of discomfort. The
contradiction in the order of sexual stereotypes may seem
dreamlike to a well-adjusted inhabitant of an era in which
action, enterprise, artistic creativity, and intellectual
innovation are understood to be masculine, fraternal orders. For
a long time the beauty of a woman seemed incompatible, or at
least oddly matched, with intelligence and assertiveness. (A far
greater novelist, Henry James, in the preface to The Portrait of
a Lady, speaks of the challenge of filling the "frail vessel" of
a female protagonist with all the richness of an independent
consciousness.) To be sure, no novelist today would find it
implausible to award good looks to a woman who is cerebral and
self-assertive. But in real life it's still common to begrudge a
woman who has both beauty and intellectual brilliance-one would
never say there was something odd or intimidating or "unfair"
about a man who was so fortunate-as if beauty, the ultimate
enabler of feminine charm, should by rights have barred other
kinds of excellence.
In a woman beauty is something total. It is what stands, in a
woman, for character. It is also, of course, a performance;
something willed, designed, obtained. Looking through an old
family photograph album, the Russian-born F h riter AndreY Makine
recalls a trick used to get the particular glow of beauty he saw
in some of the women's faces:
... these women knew that in order to be beautiful, what they
must do several seconds before the flash blinded them was to
articulate the following mysterious syllables in French, of which
few understood the meaning: "pe-tite-pomme." As if by magic, the
mouth, instead of being extended in counterfeit bliss, or
contracting into an anxious grin, would form a gracious round. .
. . The eyebrows arched slightly, the oval of the cheeks was
elongated. You said "petite pomme, " and the shadow of a distant
and dreamy sweetness veiled your gaze, refined your features ...
A woman being photographed aspired to a standardized look that
signified an ideal refinement of "feminine" traits, as conveyed
through beauty; and beauty was understood to be a distancing from
the ordinary; as photographed, it projected something enigmatic,
dreamy, inaccessible. Now, idiosyncrasy and forthrightness of
expression are what make a photographic portrait interesting. And
refinement is passe, and seems pretentious or phony.
Beauty-as photographed in the mainstream tradition that prevailed
until recently-blurred women's sexuality. And even in photographs
that were frankly erotic, the body might be telling one story and
the face another: a naked woman lying in a strenuously indecent
position, spread-eagled or presenting her rump, with the face
turned toward the viewer wearing the vapidly amiable expression
of respectable photographic portraiture. Newer ways of
photographing women are less concealing of women's sexuality,
though the display of once forbidden female or carnal
posturing is still fraught as a subject, so inveterate are
responses that reassert male condescensions to women in the guise
of lecherous appreciation. Women's libidinousness is always being
repressed or held against them.
The identification of women with beauty was a way of immobilizing
women. While character evolves, reveals, beauty is static, a
, a magnet for projection. In the legendary final of
Queen Chrl'stina, the Queen-Greta Garbo-having abdicated the
Swedish throne, renouncing the masculinizing prerogatives of a
monarch for the modesty of a woman's happiness, and boarded the
ship to join her foreign lover and depart with him into exile
only to find him mortally wounded by a vengeful rejected suitor
from her court, stands at the ship's prow with the wind in her
face, a monument of heartbreak. While the lighting for the
was being prepared, Garbo asked the director, Rouben Mamoulian,
what she should be thinking during the take. Nothing, he famously
replied. Don't think of anything. Go blank. His instruction
produced one of the most emotion-charged images in movie history:
as the camera moves in and holds on a long close-up, the
spectator has no choice but to read ing despair on that
incomparably beautiful, dry-eyed, vacant face. The face that is a
on which one can project whatever is desired is the
consummate perfection of the looked-at-ness of women.
The identification of beauty as the ideal condition of a woman
is, if anything, more powerful than ever, although today's hugely
complex fashionand-photography system sponsors norms of beauty
that are far less provincial, more diverse, and favor brazen
rather than demure ways of facing the camera. The downcast gaze,
a ste of the presentation of women to the camera, should have
a touch of sullennness if it is not to seem insipid. Ideas of
beauty are less immobilizing now. But beauty itself is an ideal
of a stable, unchanging appearance, a commitment to staving off
or disguising the marks of time. The norms of sexual
attractiveness for women are an index of their vulnerability. A
man ages into his powers. A woman ages into being no longer
desired.
Forever young, forever good-looking, forever sexy-beauty is still
a construction, a transformation, a masquerade. We shouldn't be
surprised though of course we are-that in real life, when she is
not decked out as a cliche" of desirability, the flamboyant,
bespangled, semi-nude Las Ve showgirl can be a mature woman of
unremarkable features and sober presence. The eternal feminine
project of self-embellishment has always been able to pull off
such triumphs.
Since to be feminine is to have qualities which are the site,
or negation, of ideal masculine qualities, for a long time it was
hard to elaborate the attractiveness of the strong woman in other
than mythic or allegorical guise. The heroic woman was an
allegorical fantasy in nineteenth-century painting and sculpture:
Liberty leading the People. The large-gestured, imperiously
draped, convulsively powerful woman danced by Martha Graham in
the works she created for her all-women troupe in the 1930s-a
turning point in the history of how women's strength, women's
anger have been represented-was a mythic archetype (priestess,
rebel, mourning don, quester) presiding over a community of
women, not a real woman compromising and cohabiting with and
working alongside men.
Dentist, orchestra conductor, commercial pilot, rabbi, lawyer,
astronaut, film director, professional boxer, law-school dean,
three-star general ... no doubt about it, ideas about what women
can do, and do well, have changed. And what women mind has
changed. Male behavior, from the caddish to the outright violent,
that until recently was accepted without demurral is seen today
as outrageous by many women who not so long ago were putting up
with it themselves and who would still protest indignantly if
someone described them as feminists. To be sure, what has done
most to change the stereotypes of frivolity and fecklessness
afflicting women are not the labors of the various feminisms,
indispensable as these have been. It is the new economic
realities that oblige most American women (including most women
with small children) to work outside their homes. The measure of
how much things have not changed is that women earn between one
half and three fourths of what men earn in the same jobs. And
virtually all occupations are still gender-labeled: with the
exception of a few occupations (prostitute, nurse, secretary)
where the reverse is true and it needs to be specified if the
person is a man, one has to put "woman" in front of most job
titles when it's a woman doing them; otherwise the presumption
will always be that one is referring to a man.
Any woman of accomplishment becomes more acceptable if she can be
seen as pursuing her ambitions, exercising her competence, in a
feminine (wily, nonconfrontational) way. "No harsh feminist, Ms.
X has attained . . ." begins the reassuring accolade to a woman
in a job with executive responsibilities. That women are the
equals of men-the new idea-continues to collide with
the age-old presumption of female inferiority and serviceability:
that it is normal for a woman to be in an essentially dependent
or self-sacrificingly supportive relation to at least one man.
So ingrained is the presupposition that the man will be taller,
older, richer, more successful than the woman with whom he mates
that the exceptions, of which there are now many, never fail to
seem noteworthy. It seems normal for a journalist to ask the
husband of a woman more famous than himself if he feels
"threatened" by his wife's eminence. No one would dream of
wondering if the nonfamous wife of an important industrialist,
surgeon, writer, politician, actor, feels threatened by her
husband's eminence. And it is still thought that the ultimate act
of love for a woman is to efface her own identity-a loving wife
in a two-career marriage having every cause for anguish should
her success overtake and surpass her husband's. ("Hello,
everybody. This is Mrs. Norman Maine.") Accomplished women,
except for those in the performing professions, continue to be
regarded as an anomaly. It appears to make sense, for many
reasons, to have anthologies of women writers or exhibits of
women photographers; it would seem very odd to propose an
anthology of writers or an exhibit of photographers who had
nothing in common except that they were men.
We want photography to be unmythic, full of concrete information.
We are more comfortable with photographs that are ironic,
unidealizing. Decorum is now understood as concealment. We expect
the photographer to be bold, even insolent. We hope that subjects
will be candid, or naYvely revealing.
Of course, subjects who are accustomed to posing---women of
achievement, women of notoriety-will offer something more
guarded, or defiant.
And the way women and men really look (or allow themselves to
appear) is not identical with how it is thought appropriate to
appear to the camera. What looks right, or attractive, in a
photograph is often no more than what illustrates the felt
"naturalness" of the unequal distribution of powers
conventionally accorded women and men.
just as photography has done so much to confirm these
stereotypes, it can engage in complicating and undermining them.
In this collection, we see women catering to the imperatives of
looked-at-ness. We see women for whom, because of age or because
they're preoccupied by the duties and pleasures of raising
children, the rules of ostentatiously feminine performance are
irrelevant. There are many portraits of women defined by the new
kinds of work now open to them. There are strong women, some of
them doing "men's jobs," some of them dancers and athletes with
the powerful musculature that only recently began to be visible
when such champion female bodies were photographed.
One of the tasks of photography is to disclose, and shape our
sense of, the variety of the world. It is not to present ideals.
There is no agenda except diversity and interestingness. There
are no judgments, which of course is itself a judgment.
And that variety is itself an ideal. We want now to know that for
every this there is a that. We want to have a plurality of
models.
Photography is in the service of the postjudgmental ethos gaining
ascendancy in societies whose norms are drawn from the practices
of consumerism. The camera shows us many worlds, and the point is
that all the images are valid. A woman may be a cop or a beauty
queen or an architect or a housewife or a physicist. Diversity is
an end in itself-much celebrated in today's America. There is the
very American, very modern faith in the possibility of continuous
self-transformation. A life, after all, is commonly referred to
as a lifestyle. Styles change. This celebration of variety, of
individuality, of individuality as style, saps the authority of
gender stereotypes, and has become an inexorable counterforce to
the bigotry that still denies women more than token access to
many occupations and experiences.
That women, in the same measure as men, should be able to fulfill
their individuality is, of course, a radical idea. It is in this
form, for better and for worse, that the traditional feminist
call forl'ustice for women has come to seem most plausible.
A book of photographs; a book about women; a very American
project: generous, ardent, inventive, open-ended. It's for us to
decide what to make of these pictures. After all, a photograph is
not an opinion. Or is it?
SUSAN SONTAG
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