masquerade

THE SELF AND THE MASQUERADE: Characters of a home town

The brief for this project was to use self-representation and the masquerade as a strategy to develop a photographic project. What I wanted to do was to use myself in the photographs to explore a way of working with photography that I have never used before. What I came to focus on was stereotypes that relate to where I come from, by forcing my preconceptions about those stereotypes and project them onto the photograph by performing as them myself. I will further try to describe how and why the project developed in the direction it did.

Having Cindy Sherman in mind, with her photographs of performed characters and the way she is representing them, I started thinking of possible characters I could perform. I wanted to do something that was close to where I come from (in double sense), meaning that I would find it interesting to investigate something from my own culture, that I have some sort of understanding for or in this case established preconceptions. I wanted the work to connect to the physical place where I come from, a small town in the middle of Sweden, surrounded by woods and countryside communities. What I believe is that the town, in its spirit, is strongly influenced by its remoteness from other cities, and its closeness to nature. Perhaps is this reflected in the different stereotyped characters that I choose to do my work about. The strategy I adapted was to look in the local newspapers for ‘typical’ characters of the region and asking people what they would say is an archetypal local inhabitant. Even though the answers to that question are quite subjected, I believe that some of the characters that I choose to perform have some kind of established statuses as stereotypes, especially the male characters. The difficulty of justifying using the different (stereo-) types of characters is that it cannot be evidentially backed up in any form, even though I have looked for supportive representations. It is in the end entirely up to me to decide and therefore I aim to justify the work in other ways than finding evidence for the stereotypes as existent.

Theories about stereotyping partly stem from the studies of the sign that was founded by Ferdinand de Saussure, and refer to how we make sense of the world by distinguishing differences. According to the theories of the sign, we make sense of what things are and are not as a way of classifying and categorising. This is taken into account when having a look at the theories of stereotypes that is also a way of categorising, but with focus on people. Stuart Hall (1997: 257) wrote:

‘Stereotyping reduces people to a few, simple, essential characteristics, which are represented as fixed by Nature.’

By this he is suggesting that the stereotypes created are represented as if they where not constructed but inevitably genuine or ‘true’ by nature. He continues to describe different aspects of stereotyping and makes a further discussion around Richard Dyers (1977) theories of the difference between ‘type’ and ‘stereotype’ where the first is referring to how we categorise in general terms (giving the example of how we would consider a four legged plain surface to be table) and the latter as the act of grasping a few specific characteristics that is then simplified and exaggerated which includes reducing everything about that person to those qualities.

Hall’s ideas about the stereotyping do not exactly justify my photographs but is interesting from another point of view. When putting myself in the role of the different stereotypes (that are based on my assumptions and preconceptions) to work with ‘the self and the masquerade’, I distinguish myself from that ‘other’ character that I am performing. These are not portraits of me, and possibly not even the stereotypes I am performing (since they don’t truly exists), but rather of my preconceptions that paradoxically would mean that the photographs in a way could be viewed as self-portraits. The different photographs could also be thought of in relation to the different roles we all take on in different contexts as to refer to the complexity of identity rather than being an attempt to justify and enhance the stereotypes. I enjoyed working with this project and it was useful to me in the terms of thinking about the representation of people in photography. My further consideration within the practice will be of whether I (from time to time?) would like to enhance such preconceptions through the representation or work against them. Thinking of representation in that fashion might make clearer how to communicate the thought message in a more subtle and skilful way in future projects.

BIBLIOGRAPHY

BUTLER. J (2006) Gender Trouble – Feminism and the Subversion of Identity. Routledge, New York and London.

CAMERON. L (1996) Body Alchemy –Transsexual Portraits. Cleis Press Inc., USA.

HALL. S (edited by) (1997) Representation: Cultural Representations and Signifying Practices. The Open University and Sage Publications, Great Britain.

McGARTHY. C, YSERBYT. V. Y, SPEARS. R (edited by) (2002) Stereotypes as Explanations –The Meaningful Beliefs about Social Groups. Cambridge University Press, United Kingdom.

SAUSSURE. de F (from Course in General Linguistics) in: RICE. P and WAUGH (edited by) (1989) Modern Literary Theory – A Reader. Edward Arnold, London.