OKAY
So, for the past week, me and 3 others have been putting together a presentation.
To say it was a challenge would be a little bit of an understatement. The reading was 68 pages long, but luckily for me, I looked at the topic of otherness last term so I had a pretty solid understanding of it already. The title is;
Gender, Gaze, Otherness, & Photography
I looked at Diane Arbus as my photographer because she looks at "the other". Not in the sense of the racial other, which is what we normally see being refereed to as "other", but in the sense of anyone who lives outside of normality.
Diane
Arbus was
an american
photographer who took pictures of “deviant and marginal people or of people
whose normality seems ugly or surreal”.
Most well known as a woman who took photos of
freaks, she strongly believed that a camera had the ability to reveal the truth
about people even though it could be harsh.
She suffered from depression for her whole life and took her own life at
the age of 48.
The picture I have chosen which I feel best
demonstrates her series is this one of the twins. These twins look nothing like the people you
come across on an every day basis, they don’t look “normal”, the strightforward format of her pictures force the viewer
to really evaluate the subject. by only
looking at the abnormal, she makes us begin to question what the true meaning
of normal is. Since the idea of
“otherness” is based on a theory of “us and them”, what defines “us” against
“them”. She points out the differences
between “normal” people and her freaks, turning them into a spectacle and
playing on the strong human impulse to stare.
In our own theory, the meaning of the
“other” has been redefined from what it used to be. Most visible in the world of celebrity, the
new ideal body is not the typical white body.
As you can see from the pictures, Kim Kardashian (who many define as having the perfect
body) looks very similar to the first picture of the Hottentot Venus, the major
differences being that her face is more like that of a white person and her
waist if waif-like. Also a typical white
ideal. The new “other” is now what we
would see as being typically white, for example, being flat chested and
pale. Back in colonial times, the ideal
body was the typical white body, proving that the sterotypes of
ideal change through trans-coding.
