Cindy Shermans - Clowns
http://www.nationalgalleries.org/collection/artists-a-z/S/18400/artist_name/Cindy%20Sherman/record_id/6271
Cindy Sherman began her ‘Clowns’ series of photographs in 2003. As a logical progression of her interest in dressing up, the photographs explore the range of emotions that can lie behind the painted face of a clown. The series was inspired by an article of clothing, a pair of pyjamas with fur-like buttons, which the artist purchased at a yard sale. In this photograph, the clown’s outfit of a rather frumpy patterned skirt and frilled blouse seems to be at odds with her riotous make-up and cowboy hat. While the costume and hand suggest a middle-aged woman, the face is dramatically different. The digitally-manipulated background to the clown refers to traditional, brightly-coloured circus posters.
LELAND BOBBE’S HALF-DRAG PHOTOGRAPHS
http://petapixel.com/2013/10/12/half-drag-photos-show-transformations-nyc-drag-queens/
New York-based photographer Leland Bobbé has put together a fascinating series of portraits that examine the idea of gender fluidity by showing New York City drag queens in half-drag. The series is called “Half-Drag … A Different Kind of Beauty” and has earned Bobbé several awards and exhibitions, along with some well-deserved press attention.
Bobbé was kind enough to answer some questions for us when we got in touch with him to get permission to share the project. So rather than give you our take, here’s what he had to say:
PetaPixel: What was your inspiration for creating the Half Drag series? And why did you specifically want to do them in only half-drag?
Leland Bobbé: I met a drag queen at an industry party and thought it would be interesting to do a photo of him as half male and half female.
Jen Davis Self Portraits
http://www.oprah.com/health/Jen-Davis-Self-Portraits-Weight-Loss-and-Photography
Above: Davis shot this photo of herself in 2006. It's one in a series of self-portraits taken over the course of a decade.
If you sat down with an accomplished self-portrait photographer, the last thing you might expect to hear is "I'm a bit uneasy in my skin right now." But that's what Jen Davis tells me as she eyes the voice recorder I've set between us on her living room couch. She tucks her legs beneath her. "In fact," she says, "I have to admit I'm a little freaked out."
Davis's inhibitions are understandable. She spent ten years creating striking, seductive images of her own 269-pound frame, and now, suddenly—with the top portion of her stomach cinched by a silicone Lap-Band and the extra weight melting away—her subject is disappearing before her eyes.
As we chat about her past and her work, Davis laughs easily, and before responding to a question, she wrinkles her forehead so you can practically see her thinking. She's beautiful, with bright blue eyes and the kind of straight blonde hair the rest of us have to fake. But because she's been obese most of her life, Davis is racked with insecurities. Since she was a teenager, she has preferred to interact with the world from a distance, through the lens of a camera. During her high school years, she was constantly snapping photos of kids in the hallways and the cafeteria as a photographer for the yearbook. "I used the camera to gain access, to communicate," she says.
But the pictures she took outside school—abandoned cars on a nearby reservation; the teenage boys she pined for as they jammed with their garage bands—reflected her growing sense of isolation. Over time she began to focus on capturing the loneliness in others. "It was like I was taking self-portraits," she says, "except I wasn't in them."
When Davis was 23, her work took a turn: Reading through her old journals, she was struck by the fact that her grievances—being overweight, missing out on romantic love—had been the same for years. Maybe, she thought, if I turn the camera on myself, I might shake loose whatever is holding me back. In the first self-portrait she ever snapped, Davis sits on a bamboo mat on the sand, on spring break in Myrtle Beach, her one-piece bathing suit concealed by a green cover-up and black shorts; the friends around her are slender in their bikinis and swim trunks, and the uneasiness on her face is palpable.
If you sat down with an accomplished self-portrait photographer, the last thing you might expect to hear is "I'm a bit uneasy in my skin right now." But that's what Jen Davis tells me as she eyes the voice recorder I've set between us on her living room couch. She tucks her legs beneath her. "In fact," she says, "I have to admit I'm a little freaked out."
Davis's inhibitions are understandable. She spent ten years creating striking, seductive images of her own 269-pound frame, and now, suddenly—with the top portion of her stomach cinched by a silicone Lap-Band and the extra weight melting away—her subject is disappearing before her eyes.
As we chat about her past and her work, Davis laughs easily, and before responding to a question, she wrinkles her forehead so you can practically see her thinking. She's beautiful, with bright blue eyes and the kind of straight blonde hair the rest of us have to fake. But because she's been obese most of her life, Davis is racked with insecurities. Since she was a teenager, she has preferred to interact with the world from a distance, through the lens of a camera. During her high school years, she was constantly snapping photos of kids in the hallways and the cafeteria as a photographer for the yearbook. "I used the camera to gain access, to communicate," she says.
But the pictures she took outside school—abandoned cars on a nearby reservation; the teenage boys she pined for as they jammed with their garage bands—reflected her growing sense of isolation. Over time she began to focus on capturing the loneliness in others. "It was like I was taking self-portraits," she says, "except I wasn't in them."
When Davis was 23, her work took a turn: Reading through her old journals, she was struck by the fact that her grievances—being overweight, missing out on romantic love—had been the same for years. Maybe, she thought, if I turn the camera on myself, I might shake loose whatever is holding me back. In the first self-portrait she ever snapped, Davis sits on a bamboo mat on the sand, on spring break in Myrtle Beach, her one-piece bathing suit concealed by a green cover-up and black shorts; the friends around her are slender in their bikinis and swim trunks, and the uneasiness on her face is palpable.
Sarah LucasSelf Portrait with Fried Eggs
http://www.tate.org.uk/art/artworks/lucas-self-portrait-with-fried-eggs-p78447
Lucas's group of twelve photographic self portraits have been reproduced digitally as Iris prints in an edition of one hundred and fifty. They range from her first photographic self portrait, Eating a Banana 1990 (P78443) to the more recent Human Toilet Revisited 1998, which also exists in the Tate collection as a c-type print (Tate P78299). Photographic self portraits have been an important element of Lucas's work since the early 1990s. The seminal Eating a Bananachanged Lucas's perception of her 'masculine' appearance from being a disadvantage to being something she could use in her art. 'I suddenly could see the strength of the masculinity about it - the usefulness of it to the subject struck me at that point, and since then I've used that' (Lucas quoted in Barber, p.16). The resulting confrontational self portrait photographs, made throughout the 1990s, complement her sculptural and installation work. Through them she presents an identity which challenges stereotypical representations of gender and sexuality. Posing simultaneously as tough and abject, macho but female, she creates an image of defiant femininity.
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