What Is Sexual Identity?

C21 Practice has provided a forum in which artists have explored aspects of sexual identity and self-representation. Provide a critical analysis of the work of two contemporary artists/photographers and relate their work to your practise.

In the 15th century, the renowned German physician Paracelsus was quoted as saying `Be not another, if you can be yourself’ (Paracelsus, n.d.), and this quote still echoes true today. In a world that is shifting constantly, being able to identify and develop who you are has become incredibly difficult, especially with the strong external influences that surround us within advertising, celebrity, and social media.
My essay will discuss sexual identity, and how it is represented within the art world. From
the threat of burning for committing a homosexual act in the 15th century to chemical castration or prison during the earlier part of the 20th century, history has proven that it has been almost impossible for men or women to be open and honest about their sexuality without fear of recrimination. However when you look back at art history, you see sexuality and same sex relationships are a subject that was covered frequently. There are examples of work dating as far back as the Paleolithic times where sexual depictions are believed to be more representative of fertility than actual sexual acts, but when looking at Ancient Greece, we see many images on pottery of same sex relationships between men. Erotic scene.
Rim of an Attic red-figure kylix, c. 510 BC (wikipedia, n.d.)
The main difference between then and now is that this behaviour was deemed a normal part of life, and was not labelled as homosexuality. The term ‘homosexuality’ is a modern word as discussed by Dr Christopher Reed in an article in the Boston Globe Brainiac blog in which he discussed Art and Homosexuality. Within the article he states that ‘Homosexuality is a modern term that doesn’t apply to sexuality in past eras…..it means you belong firmly to one sex and are attracted to people of that same sex. But societies throughout history have had much more fluid ideas about sex and gender.’ (Rothman, 2011)
We have witnessed a dramatic rise around the discussion of sexual identity, watching it grow into a subject of strong debate over the last half century. With the introduction of LGBT groups whose sole purpose are to fight for the rights of LGBT people in a very visible way, who we are, and our own understanding of other peoples sexuality has become something that has become a political hot potato, and promises to continue to inspire discussion and debate for a long time to
come.
For the art world, this has been a subject with many potential avenues, and allows the artist/photographer to truly explore a subject that relates to everyone at a base level. Their art/photography is an attempt to answer questions. What makes an individual tick? Are these choices static through life, or should we expect change as we grow and mature? Should we allow change, or does that make us fickle, and when we don’t fit in with the norm, how does the world perceive us, and how do we perceive ourselves?
One of the photographers that I have chosen to look at is Sally Mann.
Although not originally in my selection of artist choices, I have included her because she has created several bodies of work that court controversy in a very personal and emotive way. Within one of her projects, Twelve, she tackled that awkward stage of change where young women begin to move away from childhood and into adulthood. Her images are striking and unapologetic in a blatant, almost exploitative way, and yet still exude a dark elegance that draws you in and leaves you asking more questions than anything else. In a recent interview with The Guardian, she was quoted as saying ‘Exploitation lies at the root of every great portrait, and all of us know it.’ (Dean,
2015).
The first image I have chosen to look at comes from Twelve. Picture from Google images.
I picked this one because I feel that Mann has captured the awkwardness of puberty just beginning beautifully. The young girl poses in a way that would be deemed as provocative if she was older, but as a child still, it is just a pose. She looks slightly uncomfortable, and based on the look of annoyance on her face, it seems that she would rather be anywhere other than in front of the camera at that precise moment. This is an image that I could have identified with as a 12 year old. It exudes that feeling of uncertainty, about who you are. You are no longer a child, but you are not yet an adult. Mann has captured the feeling of self-consciousness that seems to develop as you begin to leave childhood and grow up. The hand on her stomach and the twisting of her toes suggests that she is not entirely comfortable with how she looks. The beginnings of concern for her appearance are starting to show through the way that she holds herself in the picture. I feel that anyone who has been a 12 year old girl can identify with the feelings that you see in the picture.
Photography critic Robert Cole commented on the body of work saying, ‘These photographs offer a subtle and knowing visual statement about that most poignant and vulnerable time, when girls become women.’ (Dorfman, n.d.) Unfortunately, because of the sexuality that seems to be an integral part of these images, Mann has come under fire from many people who believe that they are extremely exploitative and misrepresentative of children of that age. Elsa Dorfman, a working photographer, wrote a short essay on the body of work referring to Mann as manipulative. She stated that ‘These 36 portraits are Mann's vision of what girls are like, what they look like, and perhaps how they feel, when they "become women." Her narrow vision seems to focus on latent seduction or blatant sexuality…… Whether the girls are rich or poor, the photographer allowed no evidence of the fun in their lives to creep into her portraits of them. There are no cats or dogs. No records. No soccer balls. No favorite ancient dolls. No Walkmans. No beloved books.’ (Dorfman, n.d.)
Although I understand, and in part I agree with Dorfman, I think that she has missed the point of the collection. I feel that Mann’s aim was not to show the fun side of that change, but was more about embracing the awkwardness that comes with those changes that are not only physical, but emotional and mental also, and I think that she has done that in a stunning and understated way.
I also wanted to look at her project called ‘Immediate Family.’ This was a project that divided many people as the images were intimate family portraits of her children which included not only a selection of naked portraits, but images of them injured, and in a couple, appearing dead. Picture from Google
The images caused uproar when they were made public in 1992, but this was also the collection that made Mann famous. Up until that point, she was a relatively unknown photographer. On its release in 1992, she was rocketed into the public eye. The book, Immediate Family has been referred to on more than one occasion as one of the best photography books of all time, and when Time magazine named her America’s Best Photographer in 2001, they wrote, ‘Mann recorded a combination of spontaneous and carefully arranged moments of childhood repose and revealingly — sometimes unnervingly — imaginative play. What the outraged critics of her child nudes failed to grant was the patent devotion involved throughout the project and the delighted complicity of her son and daughters in so many of the solemn or playful events. No other collection of family photographs is remotely like it, in both its naked candor and the fervor of its maternal curiosity and care.’ (Price, n.d.)
Unfortunately, although most parents are able to identify with the moments that Mann captured, religious groups and critics accused the collection of being exploitative and referred to it as pornographic, even going to the extent of having her investigated whilst she had a show on at the Milwaukee Art Museum. Mann defended her work in an interview with The Guardian where she said ‘Many of these pictures are intimate, some fictions and some fantastic…..but most are ordinary things that every mother has seen.’ (O'Hagan, 2010)
She is an artist who has created beautiful, haunting images that tackle taboo subjects such as sexuality, death, and identity. Her pictures are striking, and controversial, but also thought provoking and elegant in a dark and sensual manner. I feel that she is very relevant to my current project because she tackles subjects that make people uncomfortable. She asks her viewer to see beyond what is right in front of them and try to understand the context of the image. For Mann, one of the biggest issues has become the fact that people are unable to understand her images, and they see something sordid and sexual within them. She was quoted as saying ‘It may be a maternal refusal to face facts……I only wish that people looked at the pictures the way I do.’ (Woodward, 1992)
Whilst Sally Mann’s focus is on children, I have also made the decision to look at Nan Goldin who dealt with identity and sexuality within adults. Her work is very different to Mann’s in that it feels harsh and brash and cruel, yet you feel that she had real empathy with the men and women that she photographed. Within Mann’s work there is a steady, controlled, almost staged feel and with some of her images it’s clear that staging had taken place. With Goldin, her pictures feel more desperate and rushed. You can feel that she was documenting things as they were happening rather than setting up a stage for her subjects to act upon. Because of this, her images are very real and very moving. They drag you into the underbelly of the world that became such an important part of her existence to a point where you can almost smell and feel the environment that they were taken in.
I have decided to look at ‘The Ballad of Sexual Dependancy’, which was referred to by Goldin as ‘the diary that I let people read!’ (Respini, 2010)
The entire collection contains 700 images which were displayed in a slideshow. The slideshow had a backing track of the music featured in the clubs that Goldin and her friends frequented throughout the time that she was taking the pictures. The pictures are a documentation of their lives throughout this period and tell their stories with brutal, devastating honesty. Picture from Google Images
Eva Respini, the associate curator at New Yorks MoMA described this immense body of work from Goldin as a ‘Chronicle of the personal lives of the artist, her friends and lovers-a young, gorgeous, and tragic group that revelled in the hedonistic lifestyle in the 1970’s and 1980’s in downtown New York City.’ (Respini, 2010)
The Ballad deals with a myriad of different subjects including identity, depression, drug addiction, emotional and physical abuse, serious illness and death. Not only did she chronicle the lives of her friends, but she also chronicled her own, producing a set of pictures that were truly shocking in their content after she was physically abused by her then boyfriend, Brian. (See above.)
The reason I have picked Nan Goldin as one of my artists to look at was because of the way she tackled the AIDS epidemic. The environment that she lived and worked in was one where AIDS was rife. Many of her friends who she photographed throughout The Ballad had succumbed to the disease by the 90’s through either drug abuse or unprotected sex. She was quoted at the time as saying, ‘AIDS changed everything in my life. There’s life before AIDS, and after AIDS…..I was in denial that people were going to die. I thought people could beat it. And then people started dying.’ (R, 2013)
For people who did not live in its shadow, AIDS became an afterthought. It was something that they could have never understood. For Goldin, it became part of her life, although she was on the outside looking in and watching the impact it had on the lives of the people that she loved. She was able to put faces and names to something that was terrifying, and document it in a way that very few artists could have done at the time. One of the more moving accounts was one of her closest friends, Cookie Mueller, who dies of AIDS in 1989. Not long after her death, Goldin said, ‘When I went to see Cookie in Provincetown, after I got out of the halfway house, she had lost her voice. Her laughter and her verbal wit had been so much of her personality. The fact that she couldn’t talk, the fact that she couldn’t walk without a cane was so devastating that I was calling every doctor, screaming at the impotence I felt. At that point, I was like a child thinking that doctors will still make you well, and not believing that there was nothing they could do. That’s when the rage became an obsession with me…It was only in ’89, after Cookie died and I put together the Cookie portfolio - - 15 pictures taken over 13 years, with a text about our relationship - - that I realized photographing couldn’t keep people alive. Even though I never consciously set out to create pictures that would help humanize AIDS, I realized they could affect others.’ (R, 2013)

Images from Google Images
Goldin’s work became, in essence, a historical document. It documented, on a very personal level, the tumultuous times and devastating addictions and diseases that became rampant during this period of time. It also however, in a quiet and beautiful way, documented love. She showed the beauty that can exist between two men or two women, and the dedication and devotion that same sex couples share. Her work was ground breaking in its rawness and its lack of technical prowess, but that was one of the things that make it so intriguing and so important. For me, what Goldin managed to do that a lot of photographers can’t, was to capture the soul of her subjects. You look past the technical faults of the photograph and feel like you can understand the moment that passed between her and them as that picture was taken. This is what makes her work so special.
The third photographer I chose to look at is a much less well known photographer. Her name is Sarah Deragon.
Sarah Deragon has only been working professionally since 2014, and has already established quite a name for herself with her first personal project titled ‘The Identity Project’. The project was put in place to explore the labels that we use when we talk about gender and sexuality. Sarah is married to a woman, and has been since 2011, but her project doesn’t just tackle lesbianism. It explores all walks of life which is what makes it very interesting.

The project began in San Francisco which is Deragon’s hometown, but due to the popularity of it, she has since expanded and taken it to several other American cities including New York, Portland and Chicago. The plans are to continue expanding and travelling as public demand to be involved in the project continues to grow.
Because my FMP is about identity, I felt that she is very relevant as a contemporary artist. Although there is not a lot of detail available about her as an artist, one of the things that I initially found difficult to understand, were the labels that she attached to each of her volunteers. These labels were decided by the individuals in question, and not Deragon, but as an initial reaction, I didn’t like the way they were not only labelled, but presented in a box setup on the webpage.

As I looked further into the project, I began to see it from a slightly different perspective. Although I can only hazard a guess as there hasn’t been a lot of information readily available, I suspect that the reason she chose this format to work with is because of her own sexuality and how it has been perceived by others whilst she was growing up. I think that her experiences as a teenager may have involved being put into that stereotypical ‘lesbian’ box, and I think that the aim of this project is to try to show that in a visual way, but that also within each of these boxes that we almost willingly put ourselves into, there is an unbelievable amount of diversity. One of the interesting things about the selection of images is that none of the volunteers has labelled themselves in the same way. Although there are certain consistencies with the names, they are still very different. I think, what she has very cleverly managed to do with this particular project is create a set of images within a format that on first glance gives the illusion of a total lack of individuality and identity, but in actual fact, through their personal selection of names, has celebrated their uniqueness.
What I also found very interesting with this project is that she has a page on her website which is for other projects that have been inspired because of hers. She states on the page, ‘This page is dedicated to showing off the work of the other artists and activists were inspired by The Identity Project. I am so very honored that this photo project was the catalyst for these other projects. If you are inspired by what I'm doing here, send me your project and I will post it!’ (Deragon, 2014)
Currently, there is work being displayed from France, Australia and Minnesota on there, which is a testament to the impact that her project is already having.
All three of these photographers have had a massive impact on my current working project. My FMP has been a very personal journey which was an attempt to try and chronicle my daughter Lauren’s journey from her coming out at 14 to who she is today. Throughout the last two years, she experienced a very difficult time that began with bullying and abuse from the other children at school, and culminated in her self-harming for an extensive amount of time before I became aware of how serious the situation had become. Lauren became very good at hiding behind a mask, and pretending that she was doing okay. For a long time, we didn’t really discuss the situation because it seemed that she was getting on with things and that there was no need to discuss it. It wasn’t until I received a call from the school to go in and see them that the true gravity of the situation became apparent.
What stunned me when I started looking into this was how common this problem is with not just teenagers, but adults as well. It has become a coping mechanism for many people. I wanted to produce something that would reflect how she felt and the pain that she went through, but would also drive home how truly damaging words that we don’t always think about can be. At one point my daughter wanted to die. To have to hear that as a parent is absolutely devastating.
My reasons for looking at Sally Mann as part of the inspiration for my FMP were twofold. Firstly, she worked with her own children which meant that there was always opportunities for pictures. Secondly, she took pictures that were controversial. They make you uncomfortable on first glance. They push you to question not only yourself, but the photographer and the world around you. They are very striking and intriguing images, but she has a knack of capturing more than just an image. She managed to pull together not just a technically beautiful selection of images, but also a feeling of growth and change and development. They have a sadness to them as you see the children in them leaving childhood and venturing into young adulthood. I wanted to try and capture an image of Lauren which really represented how she felt. It needed to be something that you could look at and really feel the emotions that were being experienced. I spent time talking to Lauren, and got her to write down some of the emotions and feelings that she had when she was going through the worst of the times that she experienced. One of the things that she talked about was the feeling of wearing a mask, and thinking that taking it off and being honest about it would help her to feel better. In actual fact it only made things worse. This was something that also became important to me to feature within this image, and whilst researching, I actually came across a picture that Man Ray had taken in which he had used a mask. I decided that I wanted to recreate this image using Lauren, and within that try and show the sadness that was there in spite of her being able to be herself.

Nan Goldin and her style of harsh, snapshot photography became quite important to me for my second image. I wanted something that was quite unforgiving in the same way that Goldin’s photography is, but that also felt slightly ambiguous. I felt it needed to be capable of creating emotions in the viewer that would be anger more than pity. I wanted people to become angry at what Lauren, and thousands of other children are put through every day, and for that reason, Goldin was one of my main inspirations. She tackled difficult subjects like the AIDS epidemic in a way that pulled no punches, and I felt that researching her would help me to create something that would hopefully do that.

I chose Sarah Deragon to look at for my final image because her project was all about identity. She presents clear concise images that allow you a glimpse into the character of the person she is photographing. Her pictures are bright and happy, and do not suggest that the individuals in them have experienced any pain because of their sexuality. It represents different genders and sexual preferences in a very positive way. I wanted to take her idea and develop something similar as a final image for Lauren. Although her experience has been an incredibly negative one, I am confident that she is through the worst of it, and is looking positively towards the future. It was important to me that I showed for Lauren, there was a light at the end of the tunnel, and that things had improved. Because of her still being young, I made the decision to give the final image a pop art feel because I felt the black and white took away the celebration of her sexuality. The images prior to that were done in black and white specifically to echo the way she was feeling. It was very important that there was a contrast between then and now, and that the darkness that she was experiencing was echoed through the images that I took.

For me, these artists have had the biggest influence on my FMP work, and have also influenced the direction I am hoping to go in. My next project will revolve around identity, but I will be expanding it to bring in people outside of my home. Lauren’s experience, and the subsequent research and time spent with her has opened my eyes to something that even in today’s world is still a very real problem. Even now, people are discriminated against because of their sexuality and I believe that a lot of it stems from a lack of understanding of someone who is different. This has become something that not only has a massive amount of potential, but that will continue to be a very personal project for me.

Rebecca Denholm