A lone woman unknowingly "cuts a flash" out of the crowd as she stood at a Shinchon intersection. For this photographer, she seemed the veritable symbol of the concept of "agashi," which in Korean simply denotes an unmarried woman, but more than that, is a conceptual category that connotes feelings of youthfulness, colorful emotional brightness, and the draw of sexual possibility.
It is obviously an image – organized around a word and concept – that is shot through with the "male gaze." If one were to get academically analytical about this shot, which is what I'm about to do, you can also detect some of what one of my favorite scholars (Laura Mulvey) calls "fetishistic scopophilia." Here's another scholar's words describing the concept (which is usually used in relation to moving pictures and sexual conventions in film, but that's just a little note):
"There are, then, two contradictory aspects in the act of deriving pleasure from the screen: 1.the scopophilia aspect or the act of deriving pleasure from looking at another person as an object of sexual stimulation, 2. the narcissistic identification with the image in the screen. Active scopophilia implies a separation from the erotic object on the screen, narcissistic identification demands identification with the object on the screen through the spectator's fascination with the recognition of his/her likeness. Active scopophila derives from sexual instinct, narcissistic identification with ego libido or sexual wants and processes associated to the ego."
I don't apologize for my "male gaze," but rather try to harness it, focus it, and use it as a way of looking at the nature of this often unexamined relationship between the way men and women relate in general, but more specifically in Korean culture, in which gender roles, norms, and boundaries are far more clearly and concretely proscribed than in my home culture.
Laura Mulvey looks at this relationship mainly in cinema, which is a great help to me as I look at this relationship. One main difference – a key one – is that I am not using her concepts to look at "fetishishtic scopophilia" in photography in general, which would be like the photography-based analog of the work Mulvey does in cinema, and what far more capable theorists might do; rather, I am using certain concepts to look at how my own "male gaze" and "fetishistic scopophilia" encounter and objectify the female Korean subjects.
The usefulness of doing this – the whole point – is to look at not just the photographer's gaze and the details of my psychology, but more interestingly, the real point of interest is in how my gaze is drawn.
One base assumption I have here is that the gaze does not occur spontaneously, but in a relationship, on the female side of which women walk, talk, dress, and socially present themselves as, in the end, objects of that all-persuasive gaze; interestingly, even women have it, and subject themselves to it.
For me, what is interesting to analyze with the photograph are not the ways my gaze objectifies and sexualizes – and remember, my male gaze here not most important as a function of me, but rather as a stand-in for the male gaze in general – but crucially, the way women objectify and sexualize themselves, on both conscious and unconscious levels.
For this, I need to take a lot more pictures, and get a lot more caught up with some of this theory. A book I need to pick up, and which I missed since taking most of my feminist and film theory classes as an undergraduate, is Fetishism and Curiosity, also by Laura Mulvey.
After gutting the bibliography for a few other key texts of interests, and then their bibliographies as well, I am planning on completing another photo project the likes of which the photo world hasn't recently seen. At least, that's the plan and a good way to focus the direction I've been shooting in over the last couple years.
Yeah, my previous photo project is in limbo, but it is largely done. There's no need to stop working, and I've already got a model for some fiction elements that will be added to the documentary stuff.
So, this is the direction of my new project, which I'm working out both in my mind and on this blog.
I think it'd be pretty hot stuff, both photographically and intellectually.
This was just to let ya'll know that this Metropolitician is still shooting.
