Gaze Photography is a Photo Studio based in New York and in Rome (Italy) whose mission is to explore different aspect of Photography through the eyes of women photographers.
Mission of Gaze Photography
Gaze Photography was created to propose the multiple or woman gaze as approach to photography. Our studio is working to establish a relationship between the viewer and the object that is symmetrical and multifaceted.
We aim to make images that could be seen from different point of view. Since the person/thing photographed is considered an extension of the self and not someone/something to obtain or conquest, the photographed object is always an active subject to explore, experience and interact with. This interaction is what creates the photographic image.
What is Gaze?
The Gaze is always related with the desire of finding the other where in recognize the self. The object that causes the desire is always an other gaze, since it’s " object that observes" . Since the beginning the subject, confronting such gaze, becomes something different from the self, in fact it becomes an other gaze: the gaze " re-gazed" .
The gaze doesn't catch the real field in its immediacy, but recreates it, questions it again and mediates it with a new dialectic between the subject and the object. In this way the gaze discloses to the mythological and creation spaces wherein the subject is putting it self in discussion opening to the multiple gazes and letting itself to redefine.
The woman gaze acts such as a gaze "of" and "on" the multiple, never closed to the fixity, but always opens to the unresolved dynamic between object and subject. The visual space disclosed by the medium of photography becomes a scene not-dominated by the " gaze who gazes", but by " the gaze who's been gazed" . This has been recognized as women inescapable ability to reinvent and to open to multiple realities and therefore to be identified and known through the " gaze of the other" .
Theories about Gaze
Gaze is a psychoanalytical term brought into popular usage by Jacques Lacan to describe the anxious state that comes with the awareness that one can be viewed. The psychological effect, Lacan argues, is that the subject loses some sense of autonomy upon realizing that he or she is a visible object. This concept is bound with his theory of the mirror stage, in which a child encountering a mirror realizes that he or she has an external appearance. Lacan suggests that this gaze effect can similarly be produced by any conceivable object such as a chair or a television screen. This is not to say that the object behaves optically as a mirror; instead it means that the awareness of any object can induce an awareness of also being an object.
In cinema theory, Laura Mulvey identifies the male gaze, in sympathy with the Lacanian statement that "Woman is a symptom of man." This means that femininity is a social construct, and that the feminine object the object petit a, or the object of desire, is what constitutes the male lack, and thus his positive identity.
In the essay "Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema", Laura Mulvey introduced the concept of the "male gaze" as a feature of power asymmetry. The concept has been strongly influential on feminist film theory and media studies.
In film and media studies, the male gaze occurs when the audience is put into the perspective of a heterosexual man.
Gaze in Media and Gender Studies
Looking at the famous illustration by Albrecht Durer on linear prospective in the Renaissance we can see the drawer objecting and sectioning the model. In this image the desire of immediacy expressed by the artist clearly seems to analyze and control, if not possess, the feminine object. The engraving suggests the possibility that the technologies of transparent immediacy as painting, photography, based on linear prospective, but also the cinema, the digital art, reproduce the so-called male gaze, which exclude the women from a total active participation as a subject, keeping them in the role of object.
For feminist such as Evelyn Keller and Christine Grontkosky the desire of immediacy is typically masculine and it assumes meanings clearly sexual whenever the object of the image, and therefore of the desire, is a woman, as depicted in Durer ’s illustration.
The transparent immediacy seeks to obtain the linear prospective through a sole and “right” representation of the things. The linear prospective becomes the normal and normative way to look at things in the world, while the hyper-immediacy becomes the sum of all the ways of seeing not conventional, unusual and, in some way, deviant. The hyper-immediacy, in suggesting the multiple (of angles of vision and of relations with the object, included the sexual one), is multifaceted and deviant. Lorraine Gamman suggested that the woman gaze could be distinct from the male gaze thanks to the concept of multiple. From this prospective, it is not possible to talk about woman gaze anymore but instead of a series of gazes coming from different angles of vision.
