Journey to Ixtlan

Objectification – A Car Analogy

Thu, 25 Sep 2014 16:43:09 GMT

I’m going to take another go at talking about objectification. I am doing this again because I find myself doing forms of objectification in my roles as a photographer and a guy. Heck, I’ve admitted before that I was “addicted to beauty”. I’m pretty sure there is hope for me if I better understand when objectification is evil.

First a definition of objectification! I’ve seen objectification defined as “the viewing of people solely as depersonalized objects of desire instead of individual of complex personalities having desires / plans of their own”.

I love automobile analogies. Sports analogies are good too, but I know more about cars than I do sports. Let’s say that a person is like a car. This is a good place to start because there are car nuts that appreciate cars more than they do an attractive person. So, let’s say that there is a car that that catches my attention. It has just the right model year, color, and shape. My heart goes aflutter just based on the car’s appearance. I just saw it and find the car incredibly attractive. People can have that impact on us. When this happens, and it does, we have crossed the line into objectification. Some call this normal. The “what happens next” is the part that speaks to whether the objectification has become wrong, evil, and just creepy.
Continuing the car analogy, let’s state how a person could react if they see a car that is attractive to them:

1) Inwardly acknowledge that the car is very attractive, and then go on with life
2) Stare at the car for an hour or so, and then move on with life
3) Research the car and find out all specifications, recalls, and consumer reports rating
4) Follow the car around town so it can be viewed as much as possible
5) Plaster pictures of the car all over a room at home

Of all the reactions, perhaps the first one is only appropriate if a car was a person. It is appropriate to inwardly acknowledge that you find a person attractive, and then leave things at that.

The rest of these reactions are legal when it comes to cars, but they would be bad creepy objectification if the “car” was a person. What is the difference? Why is it OK to plaster a room with pictures of a car, but not pictures of a person? Why can’t I find out everything there is to know about a person? Why can’t I follow them around to appreciate their attractiveness? The answer is the acknowledgement of the person as a human being. The answer is seeing them as a spiritual equal and then treating them with respect. And because of this, while it may be OK to think a person is outward very attractive, it is NOT OK to move beyond that.

What is the lesson here? It seems that too many people treat attractive people like they would a beautiful car. Do they know different? One would hope, but somewhere the appreciation that the person is more than just a car is lost. I suspect that we are taught more about wanting things than we are taught about appreciating things. We are taught more about life being about objects than we are taught about the innate humanity of people.

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Intention, Humility and Honesty

Sat, 25 Jan 2014 23:41:57 GMT

I recently posted that good intent was the key to avoiding the trap of sexual objectifying photographs. An insightful friend commented "(there is) subjectivity in how people interpret images". True! You can't please all the people all the time. So how can a photographer have a comfort level with their intentional acts if somebody is complaining? I believe the answer is a combination of humility and honesty. If 90% of people tell me that a picture I took is so sexually objectifying that it is basically porn, than I need to stop deluding myself that I was taking a picture of a pretty girl next to a tiger. If one person out of fifty says that I’m they are profoundly disturbed, I would chalk it up to their personal issues.

Humility arrives when you listen to the feedback with a grain of salt and then adjust your intentions. The salt would put aside the small feedback and respond to the big feedback. Honesty arrives when you really embrace either not sexually objectifying your art or you embrace doing something else. What if an artists wants to go the sexually objectifying route to pay the bills? Bully for them, but be honest about what you're doing. Then have the humility to take your lumps when the opponents of sexual objectification show up at your door! This is usually not a problem because there are avenues for sexually objectifying photographers, and these venues are away from commonly used social media sites. Personally I like to share my work with a wide audience, so punch up my humility if you see issues with my creations!

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Sexual Objectification and Photography

Fri, 24 Jan 2014 18:52:53 GMT

Another important thing for a healthy society… I saw a video today about sexual objectification: the viewing of people solely as depersonalized objects of desire instead of individual of complex personalities having desires / plans of their own.

A quick review of the video: Objectification makes people a mish-mash of body parts. Objectification makes people defined by their body parts instead of a whole person. The video presented that our society sees men as a whole thing while women are just parts. People should be mostly subjects and occasionally objects. This is status quo for men. Men of all body types (fat, thin, bald, etc) are seen on TV with women of one body type (sexy). There are regular halloween costumes for boys and sexed up ones for women. The end result is that men are mostly sexual subjects while women are mostly sexual objects.

What does this have to do with my life? Photography walks the line of objectification. The visual format of photography struggles to capture “the entire person”. This inherent challenge is compounded with objectification being the quick path of photographic popularity. Advertising has figured this out. Photography inherently seeks beauty. Are there boudoir photographers seeking the “whole person”? Are they seeking the subject instead of the object? Sure, but the line is thin and the slope is slippery.

How can a photographer monitor themselves? The answer is intent. A close-up photograph may feature a female model’s face and upper torso, but if the intent is to capture the person instead of their breasts, than the intent is good. Saying “the entire body is in the shot, so I am going after the subject” is not always a truthful statement, especially when the pose of the model presents them as an object of gratification.

The majority of my photographs are in the realm of dance photography. My intent is to capture the dancers, the dance, and the moment. I am guilty of appreciating a sexy dancer. The balance to this is that all dancers and dancing are given equal appreciation as the magical subjects that they are. Going back to the original definition, the photographer with pure(r) intent presents subjects having desires and plans of their own. The photographed people become the subject of the photograph instead of the photograph being a sexy collection of their body parts. To echo the video, the desired result is that of mostly subjects and occasionally objects.

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