The Gaze and The Media

helen.clarke@leeds-art.ac.uk

according to usage and conventions which are at last being questioned but have by no means been overcome - men act and women appear. Men look at women. Women watch themselves being looked at (Berger 1972)

Hans Memling Vanity (1485)

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ALEXANDRE CABANEL Birth Of Venus 1863

SopSophie Dahl for Opium

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Titian's Venus of Urbino,1538

MANET - Olympia1863

Ingres Le Grand Odalisque (1814)

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MANET - Bar at the Folies Bergeres, 1882

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Jeff Wall Picture For Women(1979)

Coward, R. (1984)
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The camera in contemporary media has been put to use as an extension of the male gaze at women on the streets

Eva Herzigova, 1994

Coward, R. (1984)
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The profusion of images which characterises contemporary society could be seen as an obsessive distancing of women a form of

voyeurism
Peeping Tom, 1960

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From 2007

Marilyn: William Travillas dress from The Seven Year Itch (1955)

 Artemisia Gentileschi Judith Beheading Holofernes 1620,

Pollock, G (1981)
Women marginalised within the masculine discourses of art history This marginalisation supports the hegemony of men in cultural practice, in art Women not only marginalised but supposed to be marginalised

Cindy Sherman, Untitled Film Still # 6, 1977-79

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Barbara Kruger Your Gaze Hits The Side of My Face (1981)

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Barbara Kruger I Shop Therefore I Am 1983

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Sarah Lucas Eating a Banana 1990

Sarah Lucas Self Portrait with Fried Eggs 1996

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 Tracey Emin Money Photo 2001

The idea that women are natural liars has a long pedigree. The key document in this centurieslong tradition is the notorious witch-hunter's manual, the Malleus Maleficarum or The Hammer of Witches, which was commissioned by Pope Innocent VIII. The book was written by two Dominican monks and published in 1486. It unleashed a flood of irrational beliefs about women's "dual" nature. "A woman is beautiful to look upon, contaminating to the touch, and deadly to keep," the authors warned. They also claimed that "all witchcraft comes from carnal lust, which is in women insatiable". It's not difficult to see these myths lurking behind Pacelli's description of Knox: "She was a diabolical, satantic, demonic she-devil. She was muddy on the outside and dirty on the inside. She has two souls, the clean one you see before you and the other." The lawyer's claim that she was motivated by "lust" could have come straight from the Malleus, which insists that women are more "carnal" than men.

Knox/Sollecito Case

The Daily Mail has emerged as the major fall guy by mistakenly publishing the wrong online version of the Amanda Knox verdict. Knox won her appeal, but the paper's website initially carried a story headlined "Guilty: Amanda Knox looks stunned as appeal against murder conviction is rejected. The Mail was not the only British news outlet to make the error. The Sun and Sky News did it too and yes - hands up here - so did The Guardian in its live blog. It would appear that a false translation of the judge's summing up caused the problem, leading to papers jumping the gun. So why has the Mail suffered the greatest flak? In time-honoured fashion, echoing the hot metal days of Fleet Street, it prepared a story lest the verdict go the other way. But it over-egged the pudding by inventing "colour" that purported to reveal Knox's reaction along with the responses of people in the court room. It even included quotes from prosecutors that were, self-evidently, totally fake. In other words, by publishing its standby story, the Mail exposed itself as guilty of fabrication.

Susan Sontag (1979) On Photography

'To photograph is to appropriate the thing photographed' The act of photographing is more than passive observing. Like sexual voyeurism, it is a way of at least tacitly, often explicitly, encouraging what is going on to keep on happening'

Paparazzi shot of Princess Diana

REReality Television
Appears to offer us the position as the all-seeing eye- the power of the gaze Allows us a voyeuristic passive consumption of a type of reality Editing means that there is no reality Contestants are aware of their representation (either as TV professionals or as people who have watched the show)

The Truman Show (1988) dir Peter Weir

BBig Brother 2011

Looking is not indifferent. There can never be any question of 'just looking'. Victor Burgin (1982)

Further reading
John Berger (1972) Ways of Seeing, Chapter3 Victor Burgin (1982) Thinking Photography Rosalind Coward (1984) The Look Laura Mulvey (1973) Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema Griselda Pollock (1982) Old Mistresses