ReVision: Women in Photography
LSU Museum of Art
Baton Rouge
Through Aug. 30
Women are a majority of art students but underrepresented and underpaid when it comes to galleries and careers as artists. When it comes to photography, you might not feel the gender disparity: Doesn’t everyone know a lot of female photographers? The difference comes in the kind of photography and what we uphold as art.
In “ReVision: Women in Photography,” the LSU Museum of Art is centering women behind the lens with an exhibit dedicated to female photographers.
One series of photos by Sheila Pree Bright shows the reality of women’s faces and bodies contrasted with images of Barbie dolls superimposed over them. Another series is a collage based series by Amalia Amaki which engages with the African diaspora with photos collaged with everyday items. The photos are drawn from the permanent collections from LSU MOA’s and The University of Alabama’s Paul R. Jones Museum permanent collections. Curating the exhibit with the female gaze in mind, the exhibit gives other disparate photos a new life in conversation with each other.
In a world where female photographers are often overlooked and women are often cast as models in certain stereotypical roles, it feels radical to see women take the lens, even to photograph men.
“Photography is a particularly effective medium through which female artists can challenge inherited systems of viewing and redefine the act of looking,” a wall panel centrally displayed in the exhibit proclaims. “Rather than simply reversing the traditional gaze, many photographers complicated and expanded it, creating compositions that privilege empathy, self definition, memory and lived experience.”
The most striking image is of a slightly older than middle-aged woman, topless, wearing a tiara while running around at night as part of a three-photo series titled “Stellar by Starlight” by Anne Noggle, a veteran fighter pilot, professor, curator, and artist. Noggle is known for her self portraits that reflect on aging, and the work depicts the kind of woman that we don’t see in art or movies very often. Women over 50 are often overlooked and erased from popular culture when they are no longer seen by the male gaze, but Noggle’s work celebrates this time of life. Rising from a plume of smoke, she looks free, sensual and not self conscious. I’m here, it seems to say, and I’m not going anywhere.
