Field Final Piece: Pinhole porn and internet trolls.

For my final piece in Field, I decided to pursue with my new-found love for the pinhole camera. I wanted to combine the pinhole effect with the Sex Museum I saw in Amsterdam as well as my subject module, which is based on feminism/sexism. I decided that the way to do this was by looking back at the photographs I saw in the Sex Museum, such as the one below;

-and use the poses and subtle pornographic material used in the images. I did this because women are often criticised for posing sexually in pictures, even if that just means showing a bit of skin. This is because women have been told to never express their sexuality for themselves all throughout history, and must always be modest unless a man (probably a husband) wanted otherwise. Therefore, taking pictures of myself, in a similar style to these images in a museum that were aimed for men, offered a sense of empowerment and control over my body, symbolising that women are allowed to express themselves in this way. The pinhole played a huge part in this because the images it captures look vintage, as they come out black and white, and had a soft look to them, thus letting me play with the look of the museum images. The images I took were of me, mostly in my underwear, and a few of me covering my breasts, which went with the theme of expression and regulations on women’s bodies, such as on social media (where you can post videos of a beheading  but not a female nipple). I also wanted to make it personal by using comments I’ve received, but also using comments that other women have had against them. I used things like “you should cover your ‘boing bongs”, and “I grope women because they give me a look”, which were sent to me in a private message. Below are many of the images I created from the pinhole camera:

During the making of these pinholes, I often scanned and printed them to create collages in my sketchbook. Linder Sterling is who inspired me to do this with my work, as I’ve been writing an essay for constellation on the punk era and feminism, all of which influences a lot of her work. Linder Sterling is a radical feminist and a well-known figure of the Manchester punk and post-punk scene, and is known for her montages, which often combined images taken from pornographic magazines with images from women’s fashion and domestic magazines, particularly those of domestic appliances, making a point about the cultural expectations of women and the treatment of female body as a commodity. Below are a few examples of her work:

I decided to use images of the degrading and nasty comments/messages with the photographs to create a strong link between them, as well as misogynistic words using ink. As well as all of these, some photographs worked well in my favour just from how they turned out, as some came out by blurring out my breasts completely, as if they were censored:

This is how I decided to display my work on the wall, with the images spread in a way that it’s simply a line going down. As well as it being aesthetically pleasing, I wanted it to display how equality isn’t on the rise as many of us believe, but is actually going ‘down hill’, as many of the comments I had collected proved. I also augmented the images while they were on the wall, and the augment displayed different misogynistic and nasty comments/messages I’ve been given or had found, which are all shown below;