Sammy Mullaney @pcaaccount-blog - Tumblr Blog

Evaluation

For my final outcome I sent off my images to a company to print them into polaroids. I did this because I wanted them to look retro, keeping in the theme of the retro images I edited.

For my final piece I created 7 images. The ‘model’ in the images is myself, and I got someone else to take the photographs under my direction. Each image promoting body image or to do with body image or what it like to be a girl. I really wanted to do them in the style of Petra Collins and Mayan Toledano. Their images have a really natural, un-photoshopped look to them. They also look like they have been taken with an older camera, it almost has the same effect as photos in the 90′s did. I have a much newer camera, so achieve this look I had to edit them, making them look like they were taken on an older camera, therefore my images look more edited than the artists I looked at.

In the image of me stood topless on a rooftop, I wanted to show in this image that girls should be free to be who they are. There is a lot of talk on social media about a ‘free the nipple’ campaign. This is a campaign to promote women being able to go topless, and that female nipples shouldn’t be sexualised, as men’s are not. Women are told to be covered up, and do not have the freedom to walk around topless on a hot sunny day, like men are. The message I’m trying to convey in this image, is freedom.

I took an image of underwear because I wanted it to show that sometimes girls are untidy, we leave things lying around that should be put away. We don’t all act like housewives, we can be messy. I wanted my images to show what it’s like to be a girl. I showed in my images that not all bodies are ‘perfect’ and there can be ‘rolls’ when you sit down and that is natural and nothing to be ashamed of.

I took a photograph of a ‘typical’ girls bedroom beside table. The image consists of, a Lancome lipstick, false eyelashes, birth control, tweezers, and a bottle of Chanel perfume. To me, this seemed sort of powerful. It shows her girls wear expensive perfumes and lipsticks, and wear things like false eyelashes to improve the length of their natural lashes to look better even though it’s not necessary. Also I thought the birth control was important in this photograph because It shows how girls taken it every day to protect themselves, as well as trying to control their menstrual cycle. This is a very important factor in any young woman’s life.

In this project I did find it hard to edit the images to make them look older. I tried to do it on photoshop but I found that it looked a bit too over edited. I researched online editing software and apps and found a app called Afterlight. I played around with this app and found really good filters and editing options to create an older looking image. I used this app to edit all of my images.

I think that my final outcome came out really well and I am pleased with the results. At the exhibition I got some fine cotton twine and tied each end of the twine to a nail in the wall, and hung my polaroids on pegs along the twine. I am really happy with how it looked, and was pleased with the positive comments I got about my final piece.

If I were to do this project differently I would’ve experimented with more photographs and maybe try to experiment with models in the photographs instead of using myself. I think having a few different models would’ve given me a wider variety of images for my final piece. I also would’ve taken a older camera out from the college and tried to experiment with that. The reason I didn’t do this is because I wasn’t sure on how to use older types of cameras, and I took my images abroad and wouldn’t be able to take out cameras for that length of time from the college.

I decided to take my images abroad because the villa because it wasn’t very modern. It was very dated, and had the same sort of decor as the locations used by Petra Collins and Mayan Toledano. So I thought it would be the perfect location to take my images, instead of my own home which a newly built modern home. I took all my images at this location and I think it really helped to make it look they were taken in the 90s.

Life drawing

Recently I went to a life drawing workshop where I have to draw a woman who was nude. I thought the workshop was very beneficial to my project because it is about women’s body image, and how women’s bodies come in all shapes and sizes. We were allocated a work station where we would be doing our drawings. We were given different mediums to create our drawings, pencil, charcoal, colour, etc. I experimented with these, but I mostly enjoyed using the charcoal, which I later had to set with hairspray so It would not smudge.

These are some of the drawings I did:

comparison

I have been looking at various different artists that I want to do my photography like. Photographers such as Petra Collins, Mayan Toledano and Jessie Lilly Adams. Their images look like they have been taken on an older camera, as they appear grainy. They also have the same style, retro, 90s esque. Some of their images are abstract, they are close ups of people or objects so that it takes up the whole image so it is the only focus. There is also the rule of thirds applied where the model is central in the thirds of the image, but the background is still visible and noticeable. I haven’t really applied these rules to my images but I did try and get them to have that old, retro, grainy effect because I have a newer camera and needed to edit that effect onto it. Although I haven’t stuck to the rules they applied in their images, I have tried to make them similar by using the same effects and the same style. I need to edit some of my images to make them brighter and more visible. I am going to be printing them in the style of a polaroid so it keeps to the theme of being retro.

Artists who use collage

Beci Orpin

Mixed media artist, illustrator and author.

Clover Robin

Clover Robin is a surface pattern designer and illustrator from Devon.

Arro Home

Homewares brand owned by Beci Orpin directly inspired by her collage collections

Drawing with collage

“A piece of art made by sticking various different materials such as photographs and pieces of paper or fabric onto a backing”

“A collection or combination of various things”

Traditional collage

Collage began in the 20th century in the early stages of modernism, when artists such as Picasso and Braque introduced paper and clipping to their oil painting and charcoal drawings.

Picasso - Tête

Coloured paper

Gouache

Charcoal

Kurt Schwitters - Das Undbild

Printed text

Oil

Paint

Paper

Paper toys

Paper toys are constructed in several ways, by folding, as in paper airplanes, paper fortune tellers or Origami, or by cutting, decorating or assembling pieces of paper with glue or tape to create a paper doll or paper model.

Paper toys date back to ancient times. The history of paper toys can be traced back to the art of origami. The word is based on Japanese words Ori, which means to fold, and Kami, which means paper. However origami’s roots are from China and it spread to Japan in the sixth century. The craft was for only the rich at first because the cost of paper was very high. They found useful ways to use the folded paper. For example, they would fold it with strips of dried meat or fish and this was called Noshi, which was a token of good luck. Also they would often wrap the glasses of wine at a wedding into a butterfly to represent the bride and groom. As time went by new methods of making paper were developed which lowered the cost of paper. This allowed the art of origami to be more accessible to all people.

Paper dolls have been popular toys throughout the last couple of centuries. Unlike the origami and modern paper toys these are usually flat 2D dolls. Often various paper clothes and such things are used to decorate the doll. Much alike the modern paper toys they would often print dolls that resemble popular celebrities. singers, and political figures. They also would print these dolls in magazines for children to cut out and colour, they would have a page for the figures and then a page of all the costumes and add-ons.

About workplace gender equality

Gender equality is achieved when people are able to access and enjoy the same rewards, resources opportunities regardless of whether they are a woman or a man.

Many countries worldwide, including Australia, have made significant progress towards gender equality in recent decades, particularly in areas as education. However, women continue to earn less than men, are less likely to advance their careers as far as men, and are more likely to spend their final years in poverty. At the same time, men often find it more difficult to access family-friendly policies or flexible working arrangements than women.

The aim of gender equality in the workplace is to achieve broadly equal outcomes for women and men, not exactly the same outcome for all individuals. To achieve this requires:

workplaces to provide equal pay for women and men for work of equal comparable value

the removal of barriers to the full and equal participation of women in the workforce

access to all occupations and industries, including leadership roles, for women and men

elimination of discrimination on the basis of gender, particularly in relation to family and caring responsibilities for both women and men.

Achieving gender equality is important for workplaces not only because it is fair and the ring thing to do, it is also vitally important to the bottom line of a business and the productivity of our nation.

Source:https://www.wgea.gov.au/learn/about-workplace-gender-equality

Idea for final outcome

For my final outcome I want to use the images I have taken and send them to ‘Polargram’ to have them printed. I am sending them to Polargram because I want them to be printed as if they were a polaroid. I want my images to look retro and I think this will really finish it off. My final outcome will be small but I am going to peg them on string for people to view them.

The website offers different way of having your images printed, but I am choosing the ‘Retros’ pack.

Source: https://polargram.com/

10 countries where life is worse for women

India

India’s vast size and strongly rooted history in patriarchy means that conditions for women vary quite a bit from one end to the other. Equal rights exist for women according to the Indian constitution, but difficulties for Indian women are still plentiful - 68% of women in the world’s second largest nation to suffer from some sort of domestic violence, and it continues to grow. Dated traditions also attempt to discourage giving birth to daughters, and 300 to 600 thousand pregnancies with female foetuses are terminated each year.

Yemen

The World Economic Form’s annual Gender Gap Report ranked the small Middle Eastern nation of Yemen as the worst for women out of the 136 countries listed. Access to education for girls is severely limited, as many are married before they reach their eighteenth birthday, leaving the female literacy rate at 35%. As you can imagine, these statistics continue to hurt women later on in life. The pay gap is astronomical, with women making just 30 percent of what men do.

Iraq

Contrary to what many may believe, the Iraq war didn’t improve the lives of Iraqi women. The Iraqi prime minister, Nouri al-Maliki, has yet to appoint a woman to a senior government role. That’s not the only field where women are suffering. Over the past thirty years, the number of women in the workforce has severely depleted, and the problem isn’t just at work. Religious leaders regulate women’s treatment at home and in marriage, not governmental laws.

Pakistan

Pakistan isn’t the worst place in the world to be a woman, barely. The WEF ranked this nation second from last (before Yemen) on their Gender Gap Report. Pakistan was also named second from the bottom in terms of economic participation for women.

Nepal

Throughout the world, women typically have a longer life expectancy than men. This isn’t the case in Nepal, one of the world’s only nations where this is so. This Southeast Asian country, governed by patriarchal communities, often sees women’s live dictated by their husbands, fathers, or sons. Marriage early on in life is the norm for Nepalese women, but education is not. Just 25% of women are enrolled in higher education institutions.

Peru

Physical abuse and violence against women is a worldwide problem, but nowhere more than in South American nation of Peru. This is particularly in more rural areas, where 61% of women have been victims of physical abuse. Even more specifically, 52% of Peruvian women have been slapped by their partner according to the World Health Organisation.

Turkey

OCED’S Better Life Index places Turkey nearly last (35 of 36 nations ranked) in terms of two important factors : life satisfaction and gender equality. The second statistic isn’t too surprising, just 29% of Turkish women are employed, a startling number when compared with the 70% of women in the workforce. A possibility as to why so many women are unemployed could be because they are doing unpaid work, such as housework and child care.

Sudan

Women’s rights in Sudan have been making headlines recently since Mariam Yahya Ibrahim was imprisoned to wait for her impending execution. Her crime was marrying a Christian man and refusing to agree to be a follower of her father’s religion, Islam. This extreme situation may seem unbelievable, but it is a reality in Sudan, where religious freedoms seriously limit citizens.

Afghanistan

Afghan women been thrown in jail for running away from an abusive partner or being forced in prostitution. 2013 also saw growing violence against women in power, including assassination attempt on a female member of parliament. Unfortunately things aren’t getting any better as a Human Rights Watch report claimed that conditions for Afghan women had actually gotten worse over the past year.

The Democratic Republic of Congo

The Democratic Republic of Congo isn’t just a dangerous place for women, but for all of its citizens. Rape and sexual assault are commonplace in soldiers’ efforts to intimidate and threaten communities. The nation was also given a seriously low score on the Daily Beast’s ranking of bests countries for women, just 13.6 out of 100.

The United States

While things aren’t all bad for women in the United States, there is one thing Americans are seriously lacking in comparison with other high income countries, guaranteed paid maternity leave. In the US, employers are only required to given women 12 weeks (unpaid) off after having a baby. The only two other nations where this is the case are Swaziland and Papua New Guinea. This is a problem that affects a significant chunk of American Women. Half of all first time mothers receive no paid leave.

My personal opinion

After reading the article that I have got this information from it makes me very fortunate to live in the UK. It is a shock to see that a lot of countries are still treating women badly and not equal. It makes me think how we often take our freedom for granted, and other places in the world do not have that freedom. It’s sad to know that in 2016 women in some places are not treated equal and it is like the countries are in the dark ages.

Source: http://www.marieclaire.com/politics/news/a9760/worst-countries-for-women-2014/

Experimenting with photos continued.

Photos I have taken in the style of Petra Collins & Mayan Toledano

Today I experimented with different images. I really wanted to do them in the style of Petra Collins and Mayan Toledano. There images have a really natural, un-photoshopped look to them. They also look like they have been taken with an older camera, it almost has the same effect as photos in the 90′s did. I have a much newer camera, so achieve this look I had to edit them, making them look like they were taken on an older camera, therefore my images look more edited than the artists I looked at.

In this first image I wanted to show in this image that girls should be free to be who they are. There is a lot of talk on social media about a ‘free the nipple’ campaign. This is a campaign to promote women being able to go topless, and that female nipples shouldn’t be sexualised, as men’s are not. Women are told to be covered up, and do not have the freedom to walk around topless on a hot sunny day, like men are. The message I’m trying to convey in this image, is freedom.

I took an image of underwear because I wanted it to show that sometimes girls are untidy, we leave things lying around that should be put away. We don’t all act like housewives, we can be messy.

I wanted my images to show what it’s like to be a girl. I showed in my images that not all bodies are ‘perfect’ and there can be ‘rolls’ when you sit down and that is natural and nothing to be ashamed of.

Dove Campaigns

Dove does a lot of beauty campaigns. They promote natural beauty and try to make women realise that adverts for other beauty companies give unrealistic expectations of women.

The ‘Real Beauty Sketches’ video takes a woman into a room with a forensic artist and neither of them can see each other. The woman has to describe herself to the artist and he sketches out her perception of herself. He then brings in another woman that has seen the woman he has sketched previously, and asks her to describe the woman again and he creates another sketch.

At the end of the video it brings the woman back in and shows her both sketches, the one she described and the other of the one the other woman described. He shows her that the other sketch looks most like her and she described herself completely different to how she looked, and more like how she felt.

The video helps the woman to see the she overlooks her beauty and puts herself down.

Link to video:

http://www.dove.com/uk/stories/campaigns/real-beauty-sketches.html

Unit 9 - Behance

As part of another Unit 9 task I created a Behance. This will be my online portfolio, this my account so far.

Jessie Lily Adams

Jessie lily Adams is an artist that I found looking through artists in The Ardorous collective by Petra Collins.

I really like her fashion work as it shows people naturally, no Photoshop just people with all their ‘imperfections’ looking natural in retro, vintage places. I really like how to looks old and the decor in some of the images isn’t high end or new. This photographer follows the ‘rule of thirds’ where the main focus of the image is in centre of the thirds in the image. Her work is interesting because her models aren’t heavily covered in makeup and their hair looks natural. I like how the work promotes natural beauty.

Source: http://www.theardorous.com/

Lauren Greenfield - Girl Culture

Lauren Greenfield has a book called ‘Girl Culture’

The book looks at what the secret world of American girls social lives and private rituals, the dressing room and the locker room, as well as the iconic subcultures of her popular clique: cheerleaders, showgirls, strippers, actresses and models. It has 100 hypnotic photographs, 20 interviews with girls and an introduction of the historian American girlhood Joan Jacobs Brumberg, Greenfield reveals the exhibitionist nature of modern femininity and how fair it has drifted from feminine ideologies of the past.

Source: http://www.laurengreenfield.com/

Interview with Petra Collins

http://www.dazeddigital.com/artsandculture/article/18304/1/petra-collins-vs-karley-sciortino

Here is an interview that I found with Petra Collins that I found interesting. She talks about her influences and how she started doing what she does and how she would take pictures of her younger sisters and her friends in their day to day life.

Lauren Greenfield - Thin

Lauren Greenfield also has done a documentary on girls with eating disorders who are desperate to be thin.

The documentary follows girls who have tried everything to shed weight, and are becoming unhealthily underweight.

Film Synopsis

“The documentary film focuses on four young women struggling with anorexia; Brittany, a 15 year old who strives to be thin to gain acceptance among her peers, and whose mother has also suffered with the disease; Shelly, 25, who has been battling anorexia for six years, and who enters Renfrew with a feeding tube surgically implanted in her stomach; Alisa, 30, a divorced mother of two who struggled for decades with a relentless compulsion to purge; and Polly, 29, who has spent years in and out of treatment and often challenges the Center’s policies and procedures. The cameras follows these women to places most have never ventured; one - on - one and group therapy sessions, emotionally wrought mealtimes, early morning weigh ins, heated arguments with staff, and tense encounters with family members. In following their stories, we come to learn that each woman’s fight for recovery is unique. Some will sabotage their own treatment; other will make significant strides; and still others will make progress only to discover that their insurance will not cover the long-term care they need to truly get well. What emerges is a portrait of an illness that is frustrating in its complexity and devastating in the pain it inflicts on its sufferers and those who care for them.”

Directors statement

“ Every girl is affected by the desire to be thin. In the United States, we grow up feeling like our bodies are an expression of our inner selves. To be thin is to be beautiful, desirable, and even moral. Fat is equated with laziness, slovenliness, a lack of regard for oneself and a deficiency of self control.

Perhaps it is due to the power of these ideas in mainstream culture and feminine identity that the pathology of eating disorders has become so common and extreme in our time. Eating disorders now affect one in seven young American women and have become a mental health epidemic.

Anorexia and bulimia are coping mechanisms that are similar in many ways to alcohol abuse, drug addiction, and self harm. They are used primarily by women to numb out emotional pain and experience a measure of self control. Though the media and popular culture help create the body as primary focus for girls, eating disorders are the result of complex mental illness and should not be confused with fat dieting, vanity, or poor self esteem (although these qualities show up within this illness) Indeed, anorexia nervosa is the deadliest of all psychiatric disorders with on in seven dying as a result of the illness,

The making of the documentary THIN was a continuation of my decade long exploration of body image and the way the female body has become a primary expression of identity for girls and women in our time. I am intrigued by the way the female body has become a tablet on which our culture’s conflicting messages about femininity are written and rewritten.

Eating disorders are a compelling pathology because they are related to the experience of most girls who have been on a diet and feel dissatisfied with their bodies, and yet they take the commonplace female self criticism to an extreme that is comprehensibly irrational. As Alisa, one of the featured women in the films says, “This is the one thing that I want so bad. I just want to be thing. So if it takes dying to be there, so be it.”

THIN is a cinema-vertié exploration that follows four girls in their daily lives at the eating disorder treatment center as well as the working of the treatment center itself. The documentary explores the process of treatment, the cycle of addiction, and the unique relationships, rules and rituals that define everyday life within the treatment center.”

Link to documentary trailer:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=v1auFrBhlHw

Source: http://www.laurengreenfield.com/

Lauren Greenfield - like a girl

Lauren Greenfield is an American artist, documentary photographer, and documentary filmmaker. I found Lauren Greenfield’s work through an interview I read with Petra Collins, and she said her inspiration is Lauren Greenfield so I decided to take a closer look at Greenfield’s work.

I looked at Greenfield’s website and the first thing that I was shown on there was a short advert about saying “Like a girl” as an insult.

Greenfield takes a group of people and asks them to run like a girl, fight like a girl and to throw like a girl. Each of these people performed it in a ‘ditsy’ kind of way. She then asks a group of a girls a lot younger to do the same actions, and the younger girls performed them how they would normally do it, not in this ‘ditsy’ way.

She then asks the viewers “When did doing something “like a girl” become an insult?”

She then asks her first group of people how saying “like a girl” to 10-12 year olds going through puberty would feel if they were told they were doing something “like a girl” and all of those people said it would affect them in a negative way.

She then asked her first group again, do preform things like a girl, and they preformed them how they would naturally do it.

Lauren Greenfield wants to rewrite the rules of saying “like a girl” for it to have a positive outcome!

Link to video:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XjJQBjWYDTs

Source:http://www.laurengreenfield.com/

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