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Title: Sex not specified: photography's gender frontiers
Post by: Shana A on February 27, 2013, 09:57:59 AM
Post by: Shana A on February 27, 2013, 09:57:59 AM
Sex not specified: photography's gender frontiers
February 26, 2013
Steve Dow
Arts writer
http://www.canberratimes.com.au/entertainment/art-and-design/sex-not-specified-photographys-gender-frontiers-20130226-2f3da.html (http://www.canberratimes.com.au/entertainment/art-and-design/sex-not-specified-photographys-gender-frontiers-20130226-2f3da.html)
French photographer Bettina Rheims's subjects have ranged from the androgynous to those whose refuse to choose gender.
It was the age of androgyny. In response to the AIDS blight of the 1980s, young people were experimenting with gender ambiguity, much as Annie Lennox of the Eurythmics had done and Tilda Swinton in her breakthrough role as the sex-switching Orlando of the film of Virginia Woolf's classic novel would do.
Bettina Rheims was a Paris-based model and then a journalist who, picking up a camera, came under the spell of the fashion photography master Helmut Newton, whose pioneering photography coupled androgyny with a new pictorial eye that disrupted classic fashion silhouettes.
[...]
After that series, Rheims met and photographed transsexual subjects; those living their lives as the opposite sex to which they had been designated at birth.
More recently, in 2011, Rheims began a new series, Gender Studies, which is currently showing at London's Hamiltons Gallery, featuring people who live not as male or female, but a new ''third'' sex, a development that was ''more political'' and ''not about posture and attitude'' like androgyny was in the 1980s.
''I discovered people who didn't want to choose, but decided they were both, and there was a gender of 'not choosing' or choosing according to the day, or mood, and not fitting into one of these boxes,'' says Rheims.
February 26, 2013
Steve Dow
Arts writer
http://www.canberratimes.com.au/entertainment/art-and-design/sex-not-specified-photographys-gender-frontiers-20130226-2f3da.html (http://www.canberratimes.com.au/entertainment/art-and-design/sex-not-specified-photographys-gender-frontiers-20130226-2f3da.html)
French photographer Bettina Rheims's subjects have ranged from the androgynous to those whose refuse to choose gender.
It was the age of androgyny. In response to the AIDS blight of the 1980s, young people were experimenting with gender ambiguity, much as Annie Lennox of the Eurythmics had done and Tilda Swinton in her breakthrough role as the sex-switching Orlando of the film of Virginia Woolf's classic novel would do.
Bettina Rheims was a Paris-based model and then a journalist who, picking up a camera, came under the spell of the fashion photography master Helmut Newton, whose pioneering photography coupled androgyny with a new pictorial eye that disrupted classic fashion silhouettes.
[...]
After that series, Rheims met and photographed transsexual subjects; those living their lives as the opposite sex to which they had been designated at birth.
More recently, in 2011, Rheims began a new series, Gender Studies, which is currently showing at London's Hamiltons Gallery, featuring people who live not as male or female, but a new ''third'' sex, a development that was ''more political'' and ''not about posture and attitude'' like androgyny was in the 1980s.
''I discovered people who didn't want to choose, but decided they were both, and there was a gender of 'not choosing' or choosing according to the day, or mood, and not fitting into one of these boxes,'' says Rheims.