Looking past the male gaze to find proper representation
Michèle Pearson Clarke is Toronto’s photo laureate for the next three years. Each month, she’ll take a different photo and talk about why it’s important to the city and why you should take a look at it.
In this very first photograph that I am asking you to look at, there are two women.
Both Black, one is looking directly at the camera, right arm jutted out just so, and the other is looking away, her body turned slightly to the left and her attention prioritized elsewhere. It is perhaps late afternoon, and they both seem to be perfectly comfortable with eyeing whoever or whatever is within their view. Including me and including you.
Photographed by Mimi Cherono Ng’ok, Chebet and Chimu in the Garden is one of over 100 works featured in the exhibition, The Way She Looks: A History of Female Gazes in African Portraiture, now at the Ryerson Image Centre.
As the exhibition clearly shows, since the colonial era women have most often been photographed by men, and very often they were being looked at without much say or choice in how they might like to be seen.
These earlier anthropological images actively shaped European and North American ideas of African women, but photographs taken by men have also shaped society’s ideas of women everywhere else; we are all used to looking at them in magazine ads, on product boxes, online and yes, in art galleries too.
We have British film critic Laura Mulvey to thank for coining the term, the “male gaze,” to describe the ways in which women are visually presented in such photographs, as objects for heterosexual male desire and consumption.
She remains best known for introducing this term in her essay, “Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema,” where she linked film theory, psychoanalysis and feminism, arguing for a disruption of Hollywood’s patriarchal approach. And although she wrote this in 1975, her invitation to consider the roles of gender and power in who gets to look and who gets to be looked at remains relevant in 2019.
Despite decades of social change, the gender gap persists, and women are still much more likely to be photographed by men, whether for art projects, magazine campaigns or newspaper stories. Oh, and men, buildings, animals and those sublime-looking landscapes on your computer wallpaper are also much more likely to be photographed by men.
Women Photograph, a database initiative seeking to increase opportunities for female photojournalists, has been collecting gender-related data since it launched in 2017, and its numbers are stark indeed.
In tracking both “the week in pictures” and “best photos of the year” slide shows, along with front-page photos of some of the leading western newspapers and magazines (full disclosure: they include The Globe and Mail but not The Star in their research), their findings show that men take between 70 and 95 per cent of the photographs that readers are most likely to see. Whatever we might think of Mulvey’s male gaze, this leaves little doubt that we are mostly seeing the world through men’s eyes.
These questions of looking and seeing and power and representation are what preoccupy me as an artist and educator, and as your Photo Laureate, I’m hoping to engage with as many Torontonian s as possible around these issues.
We’re living in visual times and as Toronto continues to grow and change, I am convinced that looking at images and thinking about the stories they are telling us can help us to know each other and our city better. We all want to be seen and understood, so let’s look together. If you’d like to say hello or have a conversation in person, please follow Michèle on Instagram at @tophotolaureate to stay up-to-date on all of her activities and public appearances. And put Nov. 13 in your calendar. At 6 p.m., she’ll be leading a special exhibition tour of The Way She Looks, along with Gaëlle Morel, the Exhibitions Curator at the Ryerson Image Centre.