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July 23, 2004
The gaze of the fashion photographer. What is it doing apart from cultivating our desire? Suggesting the priority of signification over perception?
Melvin Sololsky Vogue, 2002
We have a spider crawling over the eye of a female model, who signifies beauty? It this not more a denigration of the eye than an affirmation of beauty?
It is more the body being reduced to text upon which the photographer's seeking gaze encodes than an representation of female beauty?
Is it about darkness and lightness of the fixed monologic eye?
And we have female models as mannequins:
Melvin Sololsky Vogue, 2002
The photo denotes reality in a form of imitation of a fashion shoot, but it also has a rhetorical cultural overlay of meaning shaped by the cultural context in which it received.
Is there another layer of meaning ......eg., one about death? One about an existence that once was? When female bodies were human bodies not mannequins? A trace of a time when the centred, self-possessive self was centre stage?
Maybe we should start to question the fashion apparatus with its inherited code of perspective; one that assumes the human eye is at the centre of the system of representation, and puts the eye in a divine place?
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Spider? Reminds me more of a male scarab beetle:
http://www2.ville.montreal.qc.ca/insectarium/html/corps/recher_c.htm
Which would overlay a different text on that image.