But would one read these things in these faces knowing that the
race/gender of the photographer is a white male? Or if we did not
know the identity of the photographer and found these things, would we
anticipate that the photographer of this image is a man?
I totally support Ginger's and Judy's rejection of the practice of
excluding women photographers from exhibitions.
However, I do not agree with Russell Cothren's reply assigning particular
qualities to men and woman photographers. He professes to read the gender
of the photographer from a photograph.
The qualities that Cothren describes are founded on cultural stereotypes
which, I believe, we should not harden.
Carl Jung, the Swiss Psychiatrist, described how both men and women each
possess male and female consciousnesses. Each of us may accent one type
of consciousness or the other at various times in our lives, or
situations. Each of us possesses a male or female shadow (what we struggle
against and fear) throughout our development. Obviously, we may find
feminine qualities in the photographs of men and male qualities in the
photographs of women. On the other hand, if this century has shown us
anything it is that we are not dualistic human beings, but each of us is a
human being as mixture.
We do have distinctive qualities, indeed let us discover and celebrate
them.
ron silvers