In this collection, five artists challenge the “male gaze” in different ways, while expanding notions of the female gaze in photography. Hannah C. Price photographs men who catcall her, while Donna Stevens celebrates male feminists. Laura Beth Reese photographers her exes, and Eve Fowler photographs “hustlers” in the 1990s
For twelve months, the Paris photographer Laura Stevens transformed her bed into a stage set for a series of portraits, and more than fifty unnamed men agreed to pose nude on a single white sheet. In most cases, she had never met her subject prior to the shoot, but after some tea and conversation, a new collaboration was born. “The shoots often seemed like a sort of hypnotic slow dance,” she tells me. “They lasted normally a couple of hours, or two albums of music. The same music each time: Bach: The Goldberg Variations and some Phillip Glass.” The sessions culminated in a project simply titled him.
“There is still a rejection of the idea that the male body has equal value to that of the female in terms of beauty and should be celebrated as such. It felt natural for me to photograph men in postures of softness, quietness, passivity.” – Laura Stevens
“Emerging photographer Hannah Price reverses the power of the male gaze by photographing men who catcall her. Originally hailing from Colorado, Price moved to Philadelphia after completing her undergraduate and was immediately struck by the loud comments she received while going about her day. Repeatedly running into the same demeaning experience, Price decided to turn her camera on those who shouted after her, transforming the jeer into an exchange. The images feel bold and unmasked, their abrupt manner reflective of the uncomfortable discourse taking place.”
In the project Ex-Boyfriends, the Boston-based photographer Laura Beth Reese turns back the clock, returning to her previous romantic relationships through intimate portraiture. Where the project began as a way of searching for resolution and answers after a breakup, it became something much more: a reentry into the tangled web of her own feelings about each relationship. Explore her interpretation of the female gaze.
Los Angeles-based photographer Eve Fowler is slow to divulge details about the “hustlers” she encountered in 1990s New York City and Hollywood; she prefers instead to keep their stories and our relationship to them ambiguous and unresolved.
The Hustlers photographs, made in the five years from 1993 to 1998, ran concurrently with the photographer’s own coming out. She embarked on the portraits, she suggests, as a way of defining what the queer community meant to her and of carving out her own place within it.
“The NYC-based photographer Donna Stevens believes that for too long the term ‘feminism’ has been associated with an anti-male ideology, but what it really comes down to is the belief that men and women should share equal rights. In her new portrait series The New Feminist, Stevens sets out to overturn our preconceptions about feminism and shine a light on the male feminists of our society. In these pink-suffused portraits, we’re made to rethink gender stereotypes and what it truly means to be a feminist in today’s society.”