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Today we had a talk from Charlotte Jansen and I was enthralled with everything that she said. Charlotte is the author of Girl on Girl: Art and Photography in the age of the female gaze. Her book looks at female photographers who used the female gaze to redefine the fields of fashion, art, advertising and photojournalism, making a profound impact in our visual world. A world which is saturated by images that place a particular narrative on the female body.

As a self-proclaimed feminist, I found Charlotte's talk engaging as she talked about how the female gaze is often bombarded with misconceptions, what the female gaze actually includes and how the female gaze tackles issues such as the female body often never being seen as neutral, as there is always some political idea attached to it.

The female gaze directly addresses the way in which women's body are seen; hypersexualised; heavily edited; and objectified. When you begin to take notice of the images that we are shown of women in day to day life, you start to realise that we're not as progressive as we've pretended to be. And that in actual fact we are flooded with images that tell women how to behave, how to dress, how to look and that are often just out right sexist. Charlotte addressed this head on in her talk as well as in her book. Part of the female gaze is woman participation, getting women to be viewed as active subjects rather than something to just be looked at. Passivity is a quality that women appear to possess, even now, mainly due to being forced into submission for a couple centuries.

She also shared with us one of her favourite quotes:

"To photograph people is to violate them, by seeing them as they never see themselves, by having knowledge of them that they can never have; it turns people into objects that can be symbolically possessed. Just as a camera is a sublimation of a gun, to photograph someone is a subliminal murder- a soft murder, appropriate to a sad, frightened time. " Susan Sontag, On photography, 1977.

To think about that quote for a second shows that how easy it is for photographers to manipulate the image that they create. We like to think as photographers that the things we shoot are accurate representations of the world we exsist in, but in actual fact we put our own context onto the images that we make and our own experiences too. To be a photographer isn't to shed light on the truth, it's to manipulate and coerce a setting, a scene into something, into a message that we want to convey. Even if by some miracle we managed to protrude the absolute truth, we cannot guarantee that the person looking at our image will read it in the same manner that we meant it. The viewer also imposes their own context to an image. It's the same with the female body. Within seconds of seeing an image of a female body you create an idea about it. Yes, this idea is often shaped by history, politics, the marketplace but we still place our own ideal upon an unsuspecting subject. We enforce our own feelings on to the image of the female body no matter what it looks like, even if it conforms to societal standards.

Charlotte brought forward such an array of wonderful ideas in relation to the female body, including the impact of social media on the female body, that I could sit and discuss with you for hours on end, however, I'm not going to rant too much at you today. I highly recommend, if you haven't already, you checkout her book. There's a multitude of images that challenge the male gaze, that challenge body standards and ideals that women face on a daily basis taken by powerful, female photographers. It's such an empowering book.

Charlotte's book and talk, made me think deeper about what gaze i'm presenting and to what end. I've always been a 'take advantage of a market if it's there' type of person. But also we can potentially take the typical male gaze and use it's seductive nature as a way to empower women if we take in consideration the reason behind a woman expressing sexuality. Whilst a woman 'flauting herself' for pure male pleasure objectifies her, her expressing her sexuality and 'flaunting herself' because she feels confident and sexy is a way to claim her own body.

Also if you enjoy feminist literature surrounding body standards, another book I would highly recommend is 'The Beauty Myth' by Naomi Wolf. It may have been written three decades ago but I promise the ideas she discusses are still as prevalent now as they ever were.