The Gaze - Student Task

The Gaze – Student Task

Create a 200 – 300 word visual analysis of a particular photograph or series of photographs that feature people.

Examine how the people in the photograph engage with one another and how you as the viewer are involved, or implicated in the image. Who is looking at whom? What access are you given to their bodies? How are they articulated in relation to each other and you, the viewer? What are they wearing, and how are they positioned within space? What parts of their body are visible and what parts are invisible? 

Think about the kind of interaction that you have with the image. Is the photographer trying to stimulate, or gratify you? Are they trying to shock you, or are they trying to release repressed desires, or overcome taboos? Is the image trying to make you critically aware of how you look at images of others? Is it trying to change, how people of different kinds are judged and used

Try to explore the images in relation to some of the terms we explored in today’s lecture, such as the gaze, the nude, nakedness, voyeurism, extra & intra – diegetic gaze.

Cindy Sherman, Araki, Larry Clark, Robert Maplethorpe, Helmut Newton, Catherine Opie, Nan Goldin, Jeff Wall, Barbara Kruger.