Who Is Candy Cigarette?

Postmodern American artist’s Cindy Sherman and Kara Walker critique and question grand narratives of gender, race and class through their work and art practice. Cindy Sherman, born 1954, is well renowned for her conceptual portraits of female characters and personas that question the representation of women, gender identity and the true (or untrue) nature of photography (Hattenstone 2011). Kara Walker, born 1969, is known for her black silhouettes that dance across gallery walls and most recently her sugar sphinx, A Subtlety, address America’s racist slavery past (Berry 2003). These practitioners differ in their practical application of different mediums, Sherman constructs characters and scenes of stereotypical female personas in her photographs where she operates as the actress, director, wardrobe assistant, set designer and cameraman (Machester 2001). Simone Hatenstone, writer for The Guardian, states “She 's a Hitchcock heroine, a busty Monroe, an abuse victim, a terrified centrefold, a corpse, a Caravaggio, a Botticelli, a mutilated hermaphrodite sex doll, a man in a balaclava, a surgically-enhanced Hamptons type, a cowgirl, a desperate clown, and we 've barely started.” (Hattenstone 2011).Whereas, Walker creates paper silhouettes that are installed into a gallery space, as writer Ian Berry describes,

“Finding Vivian Maier” is a documentary about a nanny who took photos prolifically. Her stunning photos were not fully appreciated until right before her death. She was a quiet woman that kept to herself. Some were afraid to approach her and thought she was left of center. Still, she was non-threatening enough for her to get close to those she photographed.

The characters Sherman portrays, lighting, clothing and expressions are cliché of what is present in cinema, so much that viewers of her work have told Sherman that they ‘remember the movie’ that the image is derived from, yet Sherman having no film in mind at all.[iv] Thus showing that her word has a pastiche of past cinematic genres, and how women are portrayed in cinema and photography and how Sherman has manipulated the ‘male gaze’ around her images so they become ironic and cliché.

This week’s discussion post was a 2001 profile of Sally Mann. Mann is a photographer who lives in rural Virginia. The works shown in the video are mostly of her nude children and surrounding countryside. The video does start with Mann taking pictures of dog bones in black and white.

Every girl growing up always use to play dress up in clothes as a childhood past time for fun. Cindy Sherman used that passed time as a way to create art with photography and is known for her talent of this act and taking self-portraits of it. Her ideas come stereotypes of women throughout past and present society. These self-portraits are known to “confront and explore the representations of women in society.” (Jankauskas).

Carr constructs what one could think of as a fabricated photographic archive, created by combining the photographs of “trophies” with untraditional portraits of herself and the men in her immediate family, alongside personal family photographs. Exploring the involvement men have had in her life; these images, like objects stored

Before starting this project, I knew very little about photography, photographers, or exactly how much impact photographical images have had on our society. I have never taken a photography class, or researched too in depth about specific pictures or photographers. This project has allowed me to delve deeper into the world of photography in order to understand just how much influence pictures can have over society’s beliefs, emotions, and understandings’. I have have chosen two highly influential photographers, Diane Arbus and Dorothea Lange, who I have found to both resonate with me and perfectly capture human emotions in way that moves others.

These two skills are what makes her work extraordinary and undoubtedly art of the highest caliber. First of all, the integrity of her images is questioned after learning that they are largely staged. This argument is invalid because photography--much like sculpture and painting-- requires models and careful staging in order to get the desired result. This helped her to protect her subjects, and she did this by “carefully composing photographs to ward off the evil eye” by using focal points and light. The Perfect Tomato is the perfect example of the use of lighting in Mann’s photographs. Her daughter, Jessie, gracefully poses on the Mann family lunch table with a meal of tomatoes surrounding her. Jessie’s nude body is the focus of the photograph with the bright, white light illuminating her figure, and the surrounding background of the image is very dark and heavy. The lighting gives an angelic quality to the photograph which distracts the mind from the fact that the child is nude. Examples such as these occur in all of Mann’s works. Unfortunately, these clear reasons why Mann’s work is ethical and beautiful are not enough for her

Terror and mockery come together in the portraits of Cindy Sherman on display at the Crocker Art Museum. Walking into the large, dimly lit ballroom, one may begin to feel a slight sense of trepidation as the viewer looks around to find nine sets of beady eyes watching one’s every move. Sherman produced her History Portraits during the late eighties and early nineties, nine of which are displayed at the museum. In her portraits she uses lush fabrics, lavish jewelry, and false body parts to decorate herself in these self-portraits. Her portraits have been know to cause discomfort in the viewers who find the general stereotypes, depicted in her portraits, amusing, yet confusing and terrorizing.

Innocence is a glorified trait in nearly any culture around the world. Many strive to keep the innocence they are born with, and plenty others spend a lifetime attempting to regain the innocence they have lost with age. In the following photos, innocence is a common theme, which each photographer approaches in a unique way. There is a dull and unsettling truth behind the innocent demonstration of young ladies acting much more mature than their age. Manuel Alvarez Bravo is one of the premier figures of modern photography and the main photographer among the immense Mexican artists of the twentieth century. In The Daughter of the Dancers, Bravo illustrates the idea of youthfulness on the verge of loosing its innocence. Sally Mann, a photographer from the 1980s-90s, caught a reflection of grown-up moves inside the innocence and youth of adolescents in Candy Cigarette through her utilization of organization, field point, and technique. In 1985 National Geographic photographer Steve McCurry went through Afghan towns concentrating on the evacuees and recording their hardships. The Afghan Girl is a classical image of lost innocence; the girl was forced to grow up way to fast. Her innocence did not survive, but she did.

Sally Mann photographs the things that she is closest to. “The things that are close to you are the things you can photograph the best, unless you photograph what you love, you’re

No other artist has ever made as extended or complex career of presenting herself to the camera as has Cindy Sherman. Yet, while all of her photographs are taken of Cindy Sherman, it is impossible to class call her works self-portraits. She has transformed and staged herself into as unnamed actresses in undefined B movies, make-believe television characters, pretend porn stars, undifferentiated young women in ambivalent emotional states, fashion mannequins, monsters form fairly tales and those which she has created, bodies with deformities, and numbers of grotesqueries. Her work as been praised and embraced by both feminist political groups and apolitical mainstream art. Essentially, Sherman's photography is part of the culture and

Sally Mann’s style incorporates black and white photographs of her children, which are presented with “ordinary moments of childhood, suspended in time and transformed into aesthetic objects, takes on a distorted, even uncanny quality” (Arnason and Mansfield 719). Sally Mann photographed The New Mothers in 1989. This photograph’s most dominant elements are value and space. Having the photographs black and white really enhances the visibility of values. Most of Mann’s work is outside and has a define depth of field to blur out the background and emphasize the focus of the children. This compositional style helps to identify the high and low key values within the photos. The clothes, the reflection of the sun on the girls’ hair, and the girls fair skin are the part of the image that show high-key values, while the rest of the photo in more middle and low-key values. The intense depth of field increases a feeling of space for the viewer. In the photo you can see that the two young girls and their stroller is all in a line horizontally. Behind the girls you can notice they are outside in a open area because of the blurred grass and trees behind them. This photograph’s most dominant principles are movement and variety. The depth of field and lack of distraction in the background of the photo allows your eye to focus and move around with the subjects in the photo. The height of the subjects forms a triangle shape, which is

The violent markings of the photo album and its images, however, produce an equally powerful message that jars the memory as it disrupts and distorts the photographic chronicle of her life and that of her family and friends. The result is a complex visual experience that addresses the use of images in producing knowledge and making history.

Carrie Mae Weems is an American artist who was known for creating works to reveal contemporary African-American life and her own experience as a woman. For gender and family issues, Kitchen Table Series, which was created in 1990, is one of Weems’s most famous photographic works. In the series, Weems made herself became both the photographer and the performer, and all of the images were centered in the same domestic scene – kitchen table. Looks like an everyday snapshot, Weems shows the different traditional roles she played in her life and the intimate relationships that she has with other people: men and women, mother and children, and women and their girlfriends.