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Maria Mitropoulos
Masters student, QUT
'Photographing and Documenting the Other: Explorations in Class, Sexuality and Gender'
The paper will interrogate the work of the British photographer Jo Spence. Spence's photographs raise the question not simply of gender but, as well, that of social class. A comparison with the photographing of Madonna will be made here. Such a comparison at first sight seems at best forced. Madonna possesses a healthy body while Spence's body is verging on the grotesque: Spence has all the high seriousness of modernism, while Madonna appears to be the embodiment of the ecstasies of post modernist excess. Spence never lost her interest in the impact of social class on women. Madonna reveals no such commitment. I will argue, however, that both Spence and Madonna deal with the problematics of the female body. Both are engaged in a struggle with the male gaze. Both are performing a body. Spence documents a body that has long been relegated by the male gaze to the domain of the medical. She confronts that confinement and forces a re-engagement between the gaze and her body.
Madonna seeks to overpower the gaze with a dazzling array of performances. What we witness here is the will to power in action; Madonna seemingly performs a different self without effort. The limits of the performance are clear in Spence's work whereas there appear to be no limits in the Madonna work. It is as if women can now make their own history just as they choose.
Madonna's bodies belong in terms of MacTaggart's analysis of time to Series B. Here one body simply comes after another. Spence's bodies by contrast are from Series A. In this case we see clearly the passage of time, and engagement with the past though the family album series. Moreover, if Madonna's works are forever in the present, Spence's photographs engage with the absence of a future.
The paper also examines the photographs of Spence and of Madonna though a differentiated model of the Other. I use Bhaskar's notions of dialectical logic and ontological stratification to show that the duality of Same and Other is a false duality and that we are all both Same and Other.
Drawing upon an unpublished paper by Mitropoulos and Gary MacLennan I posit six others - Trace, Resource, Exotic (Fascinating - Erotic), Pitiable, Comical and Feared/Despised. The notion of the other as Trace draws upon the philosophy of Emmanuel Levinas in which the Other is the trace of the ultimate Other that some call God. I argue that Spencer's struggle with the gaze can also be read as her resistance to characterisation of her as the Pitiable Other, and an attempt to find herself as the Other as Trace.
Madonna by contrast has been classified as the Exotic Erotic Other. She does not fight this classification. Indeed she revels in it. She is happy to live where motley is worn. But she too is subject to the imperative of Series A. Time's winged chariot is hurrying near. She also will turn middle-aged, and the glow of youth that she spreads about us will be spread about us no longer. Madonna's engagement with the Other as Trace will then begin.
Bio: Maria Mitropoulos is a Masters student at QUT. Maria's principal supervisor for this post graduate study is Dr Gary MacLennan. Maria is a professional photographer/film maker who also teaches photography and screen studies in the Film and Television discipline within the Creative Industries Faculty at QUT. Maria is the Chair of Catalyst, a youth arts organisation based in the northern corridors of Brisbane and founded on a philosophy of community cultural development. She has facilitated a number of community, youth and cultural mapping based photographic/video projects. Her interest in photography lies in the intersection of the domains of documentary , portraiture, therapy and art. Her thesis topic is 'Regimes of Othering: Documentary Photography at the Margins.' Her special interest lies in applying Roy Bhaskar's Dialectical Critical Realism to Documentary Photography. She has had a number of papers published in overseas refereed journals.
<m.mitropoulos@qut.edu.au>