Text On Method - Paula

Intro

With this text I would like to reflect on the methods I have been using in my work so far and think about how I want them to change and develop in my future work.

A short note on my background and my work as an editorial photographer

I have been trained as a photographer at a German university with its strength in documentary photography. Since my graduation five years ago I've been working as an editorial photographer, mainly taking portraits for magazines. In this work I pay much attention to composition, colors (as a key element for composition) and of course framing. I like to use flash and tend to place the subject in the center of the image. I don't work in a narrative way, not telling stories in a sequence of photographs. I rather have my subject become a part of their surroundings in one single image. I usually have the subjects looking into the camera, thus being aware of being photographed. These are all elements that can be found in my artistic work as well.

The most significant part of the work though is the engagement with the subject. Often I work with people who are normally not being photographed, so a big part of my work is to create an environment in which the subject feels comfortable. I have to be able to make them feel confident and trust me, often in a very short amount of time. As someone who is supersensitive to the emotions of others, this is a special challenge for me as a photographer. You have to be able to use your emotions to influence the emotions of your subject in order to regulate the atmosphere of the environment in the way you the image to turn out.

My previous work and influences

Like in my work as an editorial photographer, also in my artistic work I take straightforward images of people often flashed, composed and centered. Throughout the past years I have been developing a photo practice that is project-specific and involves photographing other people. Recurring themes in my works are desire, sexuality, gender and representation and I usually work in a serial way.

My work is very much informed by ideas rooted in Queer Theory. I studied books such as Gender as a category in Art History which raised questions such as How are image, gaze and gender connected? Is there such a thing as female aesthetics? What part does the artists' understanding of gender roles play in artworks? Why are there so few great female artists?. One main concern in this book is to examine how images of representation structure and produce reality instead of simply reproducing it. In Art, sexuality and gender constructions in the occidental culture by Daniela Hammer-Tugendhat I learned how the male figure has left the sexual imagery completely by the 19th century to become the spectator of the image. According to her male sexuality manifests itself in the naked female body. The male artist turns the naked female body into art. She states that the depiction of sexuality reflects the power relations in society. John Berger also talked about the importance of considering the spectator of an image as an important part in the power triangle between model, artist and spectator. He points out that almost all post-Renaissance European sexual imagery is frontal - either literally or metaphorically - because the sexual protagonist is the spectator looking at it.

Being influenced by these books and ideas, I've been engaging with the exploration of the visibility of female desire in visual art - especially in photography. Exceptional Encounters is a project I did during the course of a couple of months in 2011. I contacted men on an online sex-dating website with the request to photograph them naked in hotel rooms. In Centerfolds I stage the male body in strange poses against colorful backdrops. When I talk about my work I usually talk about how I miss the female gaze in works that engage with the topic of desire and sexuality. I talk about how the gaze on the male nude in photography has always almost exclusively been a male/gay gaze and how I feel excluded from the audience. I talk about the absence of female desire manifesting itself in the male form and how female artists tend to work with the female form addressing feminist issues. I talk about a missing image tradition when it comes to the male nude from a female, feminist perspective. I talk about how this lack of female sexuality in lens-based art, also has an effect on the way we understand sexuality: the active male viewer and the passive female object. I talk about the traditional division between the man behind the camera and the woman in front of it. All these thoughts have been addressed by many Queer Theorists, Feminists and Art Historians. When comparing my two works Exceptional Encounters and Centerfolds which both depict somewhat naked men, I talk about the genre of the nude and how it pretends to come across all natural while really it's a very specific construction. Not only a construction of an image but also of our ideas about sexuality. I also talk about the distinction of a naked portrait and the nude.

All these aspects remain important to me and my work. But what's also an important aspect of the work is my personal motivation and my sense of adventure that made me want to become part of some kind of role play. The meetings in the hotel rooms were loaded with a sense of secrecy, fantasy and expectations. The camera setting served as an excuse to give in to a power play between two strangers. By adding this information to the work it becomes more personal and this is a direction that I would like to stress.

My most recent work, my shifting approach and where I am currently at

In my most recent work worldpeace I work with found footage for the first time. It's still a photographic series in the sense that the images were originally taken with a photo camera by a photographer and that each image of the series is presented in the same size and they all depict the same motif in a variation. But the work is becoming more of an installation in the room: Instead of hanging the images on the wall, they are standing on the floor currently leaning on the wall but ideally standing on their own in a circle. Presenting the images in a circle dictates creates a fixed distance of the viewer that doesn't allow for distance.

Within the images there are emotions depicted which is also new in my work. Up to now I preferred neutral gazes on my subjects. What also differs to my previous work is the decision to work with images lacking in photographic quality. In fact the artefacts of the low res images are welcomed and are even superimposed by the grids resulting from rephotographing the images from the monitor. Through these flaws the images reveal their origin from behind the screens.

At the moment I'm experimenting with different media such as video and writing. Also I'm doing different courses at the WDKA working with materials such as clay and metal. I'm not sure where this might lead but I'm enjoying doing it.

For my next work I would like dig deeper into theories of emotions. It's a very fresh idea and I haven't specified in what way yet. I just know that within this broad range, I find the psychological aspect of super interesting such as co-dependencies, how emotions can travel from one person to another or how they exist in groups. In worldpeace expressions of emotions and their ambiguity are at the very core of the work already and in my future work I would like to circle around a concrete topic that I haven't specified yet. Also still very vague is the idea that I want to develop room installations with images, video projections and sound.

I've been reading The Cultural Politics of Emotion by Sara Ahmed and am interested in her theory of Sociality of Emotions. I like to research different other theories of emotions to find out what interest me most. I assume that a psychological approach could inspire my future work most. Sara Ahmed recommends Strongman's book The psychology of emotion. I will try to get a grip on that. Also I've been reading books by Brené Brown and Harriet Lerner, two American psychologists that study and publish books on particular emotions such as shame and anger. I've been dealing with these topics also on a personal level and I would love to engage with this artistically as well. Video works that I like and that I would feel engage with a psychology of emotions in one way or the other are for example Gillian Wearing's Confess all on video and 2 into 1 and Jesper Just's No Man Is an Island.

Bibliography

Sara Ahmed - The cultural politics of emotion

Daniela Hammer-Tugendhat - Art, sexuality and gender constructions in the occidental culture

Anja Zimmermann - Introduction: Gender as a category of art history research

John Berger - Ways of Seeing