Opinions about life and culture, A world view of a Woman Artist travelling from The Middle-east to Europe in the 80's, 90's and 2000/2019 ..... Autobiographycal Stories which have been published in the book "A Time For dreamers" (Austin Macauley Publishers) and some self published Stories on Kindle ( "Paris 2015" / "I Believe in You")
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Abigail Heyman’s Groundbreaking Images of Women’s Lives (from The New Yorker)
In a two-page spread featured early on in “Growing up Female,”
a photography book by Abigail Heyman, from 1974, two black-and-white
pictures are laid out side by side. The left-hand photo shows a
reflection of a little girl, from the shoulders up, gazing at herself in
a bathroom mirror. The child, who is perhaps four or five, with dark,
wide-set eyes and a pixie haircut, is separated from her likeness by a
counter, whose white-tiled expanse is littered with a variety of beauty
products: perfume bottles, creams, and soaps. These quotidian markers of
feminine routine are accompanied by an element of fantasy; gazing at
herself, the little girl stretches a slinky into a makeshift tiara atop
her head. Seemingly mesmerized by her own image, she is captured at the
innocent early stages of preoccupation with womanly self-presentation
and self-making. On the spread’s right-hand side, meanwhile, is a
self-portrait of Heyman in a mirror, though it is cut off not at the
shoulders but at the neck—a composition more evocative of a decapitated
head than of a classical bust. In the photo, Heyman is in her early
thirties, and her face, under a halo of messy hair, wears a worried
expression. Like her young counterpart, she is separated from her image
by beauty products, but, here, they read less as tools of pleasurable
transformation and more as objects that split a woman from her self, a
divide echoed by an ugly crack that runs the length of the wall on which
the mirror hangs. There is no sense of wonder here, only a drab
reality, thick with dread. On the page, above the picture of the little
girl, there is a handwritten quote: “My aunt used to say, ‘You’re a
pretty girl. You’ll do well.’ ” Set next to Heyman’s bleak
self-portrait, this sentence seems less like a reassuring truism and
more like a witch’s curse.
“Ashley in Mirror,” 1973.
“Self-Portrait,” 1971.
Fantasy
and reality, joy and oppression, hope and difficulty: the two images
present contrasting but complementary angles from which to look at the
everyday business of being a woman, which Heyman sought to document in
all its complexity. “Growing up Female” was a hit when it was published,
selling more than thirty-five thousand copies and serving as a de-facto
companion piece to one of the bibles of American second-wave feminism, “Our Bodies, Ourselves,”
from 1970, an instructional guide whose direct, unembarrassed approach
to women’s health and sexuality—and women’s right to make decisions
regarding their bodies—was positively revolutionary. Although Heyman’s
book was a collection of fine-art photographs, it, too, aimed to provide
women with a rousing reaffirmation of their own corporeal and emotional
experiences, many of which had historically been hidden or diminished.
“Heyman’s work is the perfect illustration of ‘the personal is
political,’ ” the Paris-based photo historian and curator Clara
Bouveresse told me, when I spoke to her recently on the phone. “It’s
like reading a private and intimate diary, but its feminist issues have a
collective dimension.”
“Indian Teenager,” 1971.
“Football Player,” 1972.
“Black Girl-White Doll,” 1972.
Bouveresse, who, earlier this year, curated a historical show
of women in the seventies who photographed other women for the Arles
photo festival, in which Heyman’s work was included, encountered
“Growing up Female” by chance. She was doing research at the Mana
Contemporary art center in New Jersey, which houses many photographic
archives, when she came upon a box that contained Heyman’s work. The
photographer, who died in 2013, at the age of seventy, never replicated
the initial success of “Growing up Female.” Between 1974 and 1981, she
was part of the prestigious photographers’ co-operative Magnum, but
after she left it, and with feminist photography losing its cultural
urgency as the eighties drew to an end, her work gradually sank into
obscurity. Bouveresse, however, was struck by the force of the pictures
she encountered, and by their still-fresh depiction of women’s lives,
caught between self-expression and the circumscribed, structurally
determined roles they are often, even today, relegated to. She was also
impressed by the arresting combination of written text and images that
make up the book. Some of the included utterances were the
photographer’s own, and some were solicited from her friends and
acquaintances. According to Bouveresse, this blurriness of authorship
was intentional—making a particular personal experience into one that
many women could identify with and claim, to greater collective impact.
A spread from “Growing Up Female.”
At left, “Factory Lunch,” 1973; at right, “August 26, Man-Children,” 1971.
”Abortion,” 1972.
Heyman’s
images are specific to a distinct place and time—the America of the
late sixties and early seventies, roiled by the feminist revolution and
other protest movements, yet caught in the grip of earlier, more
conservative ideologies. In other ways, however, these humanistic photos
still feel relevant to our time. In several images, each taken in a
different location and context, a woman is seen with her legs spread
open. A stripper, her head and face obscured and her genitalia agape,
performs a dance for a row of silent, gazing men; a new mother, her legs
tented wide under surgical fabric, gives birth. (“At first I didn’t
want my husband in the delivery room because I didn’t want him to see me
that exposed. And I was afraid he would never want to make love with me
again,” the accompanying text says.) Heyman herself is represented,
too: “Nothing ever made me feel more like
a sex object than going through an abortion alone,” she writes, the
text hovering above an image of the dark triangle of her own legs,
between which a doctor stands, performing the newly legal procedure.
“Confused Army,” 1971.
“Lingerie Shop,” 1972.
“Stripper,” 1971.
Women,
Heyman showed, are always at risk of being seen as an
abstraction—something less than fully human. In such a context,
photography itself becomes a feminist act. In the act of composing these
images, some of which dealt with private, taboo moments that had
rarely, if ever, figured in the world of fine photography, Heyman
reclaimed not just her own humanity but that of her subjects’ as well.
In one image, a woman lies on her back, naked from the waist down, save
for her socks, interacting genially with a group of fellow-women, who
crowd encouragingly around her. “In a woman’s gynecological self-help
group I got to know my body—and myself—better,” the text on the page
opposite the photo reads. “Have you ever looked at your own cervix?” If a
woman is exposed here, it is peaceably, unashamedly, painlessly, for
her own education and that of other women. Looking at this image, it
occurred to me that the book’s title might have meaning beyond the
merely biological. To grow up female is not just to develop in a woman’s
body over time but also to emerge into a greater, less embarrassed,
less hidden, and more present understanding of what being a woman means,
as complicated and contradictory as that meaning might be.
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Life and opinions of Jahan Namazie/Azim Ali .... written in the summer of 2018 They had this theory that children being small didn't need much food. The choicest food was given to the men, as they were the bread winners so they needed to eat well. The dastarkhan was laid with all the best dishes. The men were served first while the women and children waited patiently till the men finished eating and the leftovers the women and rest of the family ate. Lucky for us we did not practice this in our house. My mother believed men and women were equal and deserved the same opportunities. She made my brothers do house work as well as the girls which was shocking as men had to be waited hand and foot. Men never went into the kitchen or took care of the children. My father had broken the rules, he did the cooking and took care of the children. Every one made fun of him, but he had an excuse as my mother was disabled due to her arthritis and co...
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