Search results for ""author marina chao""

Portraits of women and girls intertwined with the photographer’s gaze, in a rare subversion of photography’s power relations This volume presents award-winning Pennsylvania-based photographer Lydia Panas’ (born 1958) much-praised series of mesmerizing color portraits of reclining women and girls. In an interesting reversal of roles, the artist's and models' gazes are intertwined, incorporating the viewer as participant in an often uncomfortable connection. Critics and curators have praised the work for Panas’ artistic and technical mastery, and all have noted and examined the powerfully affecting gaze of her subjects. Panas notes: “While my subjects do in actuality turn their gaze towards me, it’s as if at times I turn the camera onto myself, both in the present and back in time.” In Sleeping Beauty, her subjects lie down, a metaphor for the position girls and women have been placed in historically. But they look out with self-awareness, in a way that implies a lack of complicity.

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Public, Private, Secret explores the roles that photography and video play in the crafting of identity, and the reconfiguration of social conventions that define our public and private selves. Consciously framed by our present era, this collection of essays, interviews, and reflections assesses how our image-making and consumption patterns are embedded and implicated in a wider matrix of online behavior and social codes, which in turn give images a life of their own. Within this context, our visual creations and online activities blur and remove conventional delineations between public and private (and sometimes secret) expression; in fact, they multiply and expand the number of potential selves in the contemporary image-centric world. The writings address the various disruptions, resistances, and subversions that artists propose to the limited versions of race, gender, sexuality, and autonomy that populate mainstream popular culture. In so doing, they anticipate a future for our image-world rich with diversity and alterity, one that can be shaped and influenced by the agency of self- representation.

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