Charlotte Jansen - Guest Speaker

Charlotte Jansen was the guest speaker at a lecture I attended today. She is an editor and author at ELEPHANT magazine, she is well known for writing her book ‘Girl on Girl’. The book explores how women and girls use photography and the internet to look at identity and their self-image. The book contains the work of 40 female artists and the subject matter of the work is either themselves or other women. I loved the work within the book as I thought that they all represented women so well and it felt like a safe space. Some of the work also made me feel empowered as so many of these women were embracing their bodies and female identity.

Charlotte focuses on the female gaze, the male gaze and sexism. She thinks that there are many misconceptions about the female gaze. Such as the term being that it is a political gesture, conflating the female gaze and feminism, that the female gaze is only relevant to women, that you have to identify as a woman to posses a 'female gaze’, that women don’t make sexist work and that the female gaze is only concerned with images of women and direct portrayal of their bodies. Charlotte is the podcast director of the Dior Talks podcast on the Female Gaze. The talk made me think more in depth about the female gaze and how it is perceived within photography.