KINDRED ARTISTS:
- Paul Strand
Born in New York City, 1890, Paul Strand was a photographer in the 20th century, who, with other renowned names like Alfred Stieglitz and Edward Weston, was famous for establishing and popularising photography as a form of art.
He was particularly known for his street photography, which was thought to be very honest and captured subjects in their natural states because he would go to extreme lengths to hide his camera from them. He would use fake lenses and prisms so that, for example, when his camera was pointed in the direction opposite to his subject, it would actually be capturing a photograph of the subject without them knowing.
Essentially, this allowed him to photograph people without posing them or alerting them with the presence of his camera, as they would not have their guard up or behave in a manner that would have been different from their usual routines. They would have been fully themselves in a public environment.
2. Neringa Rekasiute, We.Women (2014)
Rekasiute is a Lithuanian photographer who developed a photographic series based on women and body image. In her project, 12 women were photographed in the same setting, each with a full length mirror placed in front of them, where their reflection and their bodies are captured in the photographs.
The project starts with a simple illustration, where the subjects are asked to draw how they see themselves in the mirror, allowing them to fully digest how they usually feel about themselves in their physical aspects. Following that, the photograph is taken, with each of the women having a different expression when looking at themselves.
We.Women ultimately sought to question the definition of beauty it’s effects. It showed how women reacted to seeing themselves in the mirror with the stereotypical global standard of beauty engraved into them because of how the media has portrayed a certain type of body to be beautiful.
