Who’s Zoomin’ Who?
HEROINES AND HEROES – Claire Grey and the staff and pupils of Holland Park School.
The initial ideas for the ‘Heroines and Heroes’ project came from my reading of two articles* which describe how women have become the object of ‘The Look’ in this society and how, because of this, what we look like and what we feel we are, become inextricably tangled up. Our image and our identity become inseparable. Men look at women – women cultivate their looks. As women, we are presented with an ideal, through images in the media, which insists that we work on ourselves in order to measure up to it. If we don’t the threat hanging over us is that we will not be loved.
The media images are carefully constructed, although to their audience they may appear transparent. Photos involve choices; who is photographed, how and where they are posed, the framing and cropping, and their relation to the other pictures and words on a page or in a sequence in time.
I wanted to set up a project with young women who would combine their own construction of images of themselves with a critical look at how media images are put together, which through this process would reveal the controlling and disabling effect of believing that how you are depends on how you appear.
The point was not to say that wanting to look good and be desirable was wrong. I wanted to start from where the young women I would teach were and accept their enthusiasms for TV, music, magazines, films, sports etc. I wanted to say that I valued them and the choices they would make and that even though they may well conflict with my views, it was something we could talk about. I also wished to bring to the project my awareness of the frequent mismatch between the pleasure I may take in a film or picture and the intellectual misgivings I may have about its content.
My idea was to make a space in which, through the practical work of taking, looking at and selecting images, there was a possibility that we might come to some understanding of what we wanted to be or might become, and of the contradictions involved in doing that as women in this society. I wasn’t sure if this could be taught, but I hoped that issues would come up for discussion as the work progressed rather than need to be defined at the outset.
Claire Grey – Cockpit Cultural Studies Team
* Judith Williamson: Images of ‘Woman’ – An Introduction to the Photography of Cindy Sherman, in Screen Magazine, Dec. 1983
Rosalind Coward: ‘The Look’ and ‘The Mirror with a Memory’, in Female Desire, Palladin 1987
Cockpit Gallery Exhibitions & Cultural Studies projects 1973-89 