masquerade
Which me do you prefer?
The Presentation of Self in Everyday Life is a seminal sociology book by Ervin Goffman. It uses the imagery of the theatre in order to portray the importance of human – namely, social – action. The book was published in 1959.
In the ancient Greek, personality has a dramatic meaning- the mask we wear it wherever we go as we present ourselves to ourselves and to others. It reflect our self concept- what we seek to maintain about ourselves- the self(mask) we think we have, the one we think we project and that others perceive. Self is socially constructed. Goffman uses a metaphor (a drama) to explain how social meaning is attributed to me/you a person in ordinary, everyday interaction.
In the center of the analysis lies the relationship between performance and front stage. Unlike other writers who have used this metaphor, Goffman seems to take all elements of acting into consideration: an actor performs on a setting which is constructed of a stage and a backstage; the props at either setting direct his action; he is being watched by an audience, but at the same time he is an audience for his viewers’ play.
According to Goffman, the social actor has the ability to choose his stage and props, as well as the costume he would put on in front of a specific audience. The actor’s main goal is to keep his coherence, and adjust to the different setting offered him. This is done mainly through interaction with other actors. To a certain extent, this imagery bridges structure and agency, enabling each, and limited by the other.
We can present self in different ways. ‘Technologies of the self” is one of the central terms of Michel Foucault, a French philosopher. His definition to ‘technologies of the self” refers to the ways in which people put forward, and police, their ‘selves’ in society. He understood it by series of techniques that allow individual to work on themselves by regulating their bodies, their thoughts and their conduct. We might understand ‘technologies of the self’ as the internal and external practice of our ethics. Each person have their own ethics, their sets of standards to do with being a particular sort of person, and the ‘ technologies of the self’ are how we think to act to achieve this.
One of my main inspirations for this project was a book: Rose is a rose is a rose: Gender performance in photography. The catalogue to a 1997 exhibition at the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, this volume presents photographically based artworks–portraits, self-portraits, and photomontages–in which the gender of a depicted subject is highlighted through performance for the camera as well as through technical manipulation of the image.
I’ve looked at work of two female photographers: Claude Cahun and Cindy Sherman. Bigger impact for me had work of Cindy Sherman and I’ve focused my research on her work.
Sherman’s pictures were not about reality, but were a record of her performance, which was itself a simulation of a simulation, a virtual reality show. The starting point for ‘Film Stills’ was the representation of women by others (mainly men) in largely anonymous B movies and television films. She mined their stereotypes and created herself in their image. This is work that only makes sense in terms of the world lived through others’ eyes, our twentieth century obsession with the stars and tinsel of film and TV, in which we stop interacting directly with our environments and play ‘roles’, more or less consciously acting out our fantasies of ourselves as characters from soaps and film.
Gender then is a performance and nothing more. Judith Butler in her book “Gender Trouble” says that ‘there is no gender identity behind the expression of gender; identity is performatively constituted by the very ‘’expressions’’ that are said to be its result’ .
By that Butler is saying that we do not have a gender identity which informs our behavior. Gender is what you do at particular times, rather then universal who you are.
Sherman’s formula has transcended over 25 years, with the fundamental elements remaining. She is always the main focus of the piece and she continues to analyse the subject of gender in particular femininity. Her photography intends to show the images of the stereotypical woman, she then goes on to mock the vision of the female body from the past and continues to reject the concept of beauty and youth.
My work
My concept for this project was to develop different woman characters which I seen in the past, back in my home town or which were just my imaginary portraits.
My aim was to produce a series of four to five images; the final part consists of five portraits.
The fist one is a photo of me dressed as a house wife, I shoot this picture in my kitchen, I posed as I’m tired, resting with a cigarette after busy day in my massy kitchen, working hard on dinner for my family, cleaning the house. I wore hair rollers for that photo. That image reminds me some memories from my childhood when I used to see that kind of images of women back home.
The second portrait was shoot in Szczecin, my home town in my friend house, in that photo I am wearing fur. This image is more erotic in a way. I am not afraid to expose my feminity, is not a house wife on that image, the women on that photograph is taking care of herself, not on a house she live in.
For the third photo I represented myself as a kind of secretary, school teacher type.
In the last two photos I put more effort in characterising myself to some absolutely different. In one of the images I am wearing long black wig, earrings, dress and images like the one they used to be wearing back to 60ties or 70ties. I am not really sure what type of women is that one; I called it flower power according to the hippie’s movement, because from that I took my inspiration from.
The last image is me as a bald had women, for that photo I used a bald hair wig and I had to Photoshop my had. I have a piercing in my nose. In this image I look as a punk type of women.
I think that I can recognise my ‘self’ in all the portraits, which I had produced for this assignment. All this characters, all this women are somehow related to me.
I called this project: Which me do you prefer? I want to display these images in the Mezz gallery without any description to them, just hang them on the wall with the question: Which me do you prefer? and I want to place a piece of paper and a pen after the some the audience can vote, which ‘me’ they prefer.
I think that I was successful in this project with developing different characters and also by performing in such way.
Bibliography:
- Lipkin J(2005), Photography Reborn, Image making in the digital era, Abrams Publishers.
- Goffman E(1959), The Presentation of self in everyday life, reprint Penguin Books, 1990.
- Michelle Henning (1997) ‘The subject as object: Photography and the human body’ in Liz Wells (ed) (1998) Photography: A critical Introduction, London, Routledge.
- Gen Doy (2005) ‘Subject and Pictures’ in Picturing the Self: Changing Views of the Subject in Visual Culture, London IB Taurus York: Pantheon Books.
- Gauntlett, David (2002) Media, Gender and Identity, An Introduction. London, Routledge.
- Museum of Contemporary Art(1999) Cindy Sherman, Retrospective, Thames and Hudson
- Butler, Judith(1990) Gender Trouble: Feminism and the Subversion of Identity, London, Routledge
- Sontag, Susan (1978) On Photography. New York: Farrar, Strauss& Giroux
- Rose is a rose is a rose: Gender performance in photography
- www.photographicart.wordpress.com
- http://vinland.org/scamp/Cahun/index.html
