a woman's place
'The Office for National Statistics said that, when it came to unpaid chores at home, women were doing almost 40% more than men on average.
Eleanor Taylor, a researcher at Natcen which conducts the British Social Attitudes survey, said the ONS findings were no surprise.'BBC Website - November 2016
transformed
This is my second set of photos on the theme of 'Women' and I must pause here to pose the question what exactly is a woman?
Traditionally the answer would be easy - the female of the species. However, there is a very significant and growing school of thought which challenges the view of gender from a binary perspective. Many now see it as a fluid range.
This is not a new concept. Many ethnic minority groups in places such as South America, India and Pakistan hold to ancient beliefs that recognise and celebrate a much broader definition of gender. If you want to read more about this here's a link to a very useful article.
The photos below are to celebrate and stand with the LGBTQ community in seeing this richer, deeper meaning to gender. They are a visual metaphor for the process of transformation.
In one sense these images represent a physical process - the cutting of flesh and a moulding to produce the desired form. The clinical terms used for this type of reassignment surgery include penectomy, orchiectomy and vaginoplasty. There is, however, a deeper meaning hidden within.
We could see these photos in terms of differentiation. Hard versus soft; rigid versus pliable; penis versus vagina; testes versus breasts. But here's the rub - we might also observe that all four of these paired concepts derive in each case from the same fruit.
she's just a stereotype
Stereotypes - don't we just hate them. It's great to live in an enlightened, modern society. Or so we might think.
Tomorrow is International Women's Day a worldwide celebration of the the social, economic, cultural and political achievements of women. It began in 1911 and now embraces the United Nations Day for Women's Rights and International Peace.
It would be great to think all the old sexist stereotypes have disappeared but of course they haven't. They've just got less explicit, gone underground and become insidiously more dangerous as a consequence.
As part of the celebration the Photography Group of which I am part have decided to devote this week to the theme of 'Women'. I shall warn you in advance the photos I intend to take over the next few days may not be conventionally pretty. They are designed to challenge, asking questions of how we look at our culture, our beliefs and each other.
Where better to start than with stereotype images of women. The intention behind these photos is to challenge whether such stereotypes have truly been consigned to the scrap-heap.
Each artificial image held up by the model hides the face of the real woman behind. Isn't it time we started to see not stereotypes but individual, unique and beautiful people?
