In fact Starkey's photographs are constructed, the people we are looking at are actors.
Her images of modern banality also suggest ennui, despair, depression and listlessness, which are conveyed as central facets of the reality of life for women in society. As one critic describes her images; "apathetic teenagers, usually girls, languish, slack-limbed and expressionless, in dimly lit cafes, nondescript interiors, and anonymous shopping malls."
Furthermore, the images also emphasize the sense of loneliness and isolation that she considers to be the existential situation of working women in the city.
In these images and others like them, individuals stand apart from the world, separated from it by a screen of indifference. It is not that they actively refuse to invest in their surroundings; they simply do not have the energy. There is nothing decisive about the moments shown in these images. Instead, they capture indecisive moments, identical in their monotony to those that came before and those that will likely follow. Here, the photograph functions not as a register of the extraordinary, but as the index of a chronic and invariant condition.
The above quotation from Shinkle ( 2004) is quoted at length as it clearly outlines the mood and tenor of her constructed images. They are carefully crafted and designed to create specific moods of ennui, despair and a lack of vitality and energy. In short the images are constructed to generate a sense of dehumanization of the individual in the industrial and urban modern environment.
The images are also by implication a comment and critique of contemporary society. This refers to the link between images of banality and materials and consumerism, which further dehumanizes the female. As Shinkel notes; " As a cultural condition, banality is bound up with the material processes of commodity production. Home appliances, commuting, frozen dinners: necessities of modern life, these things also embody a kind of vacancy in the phenomenological register. Banal objects lack anima. "
Banality therefore is associated with mindlessness and an emptiness of meaning, which again reflects on the life of the women in the images. "Numbing the senses and paralyzing the imagination, banality is the cut-price plastic materialization of the "crisis in perception" that marked modernity."
Images of this type can be seen in the works of Starkey. An example is Untitled, October 1998, where a young woman is looking into a changing-room mirror. She is obvious weary of the process of consumerism. There is as lack of interest or vigor in her demeanor that expresses a sense of banality and meaninglessness, which is also a reflection on the consumer society.
The figures in her photographs don't do much; they wait in cafes, linger in a video rental store, stare out of windows on the bus. Isolated by their own thoughts, these figures are intermittently present and remote from their immediate surroundings, caught up by dramas taking place elsewhere.
A central aspect of many of her images is the apparent lack of emotion in the characters. Some critics have commented that this style of imagery can be linked to the Dusseldorf School photography and which can also be related to the flat objectivity of Thomas Ruff, Thomas Demand and Andreas Gursky.
2.2. Cindy Sherman
( Source: http://www.artnet.com/artwork/425981200/425359759/cindy-sherman-untitled-464.html)
Cindy Sherman was born in 1954 in New Jersey and was deeply influenced by the mass media and the way that images were constructed and manipulated by television, film, and photography. Her work is on one level concerned with redefining icons and images of popular culture. She was also deeply influenced by the development of the feminist movement in the seventies.
Her work has won numerous prestigious awards, which includes artistic recognition for her Untitled Film Stills (1977-80). Her artistic rationale has been to "disguise" herself by dressing up and adopting different personas. In effect she creates role-playing scenarios with herself as the main character, which are then photographed For example, Untitled Film Stills is a series of 69 enigmatic black-and-white self-portraits which emulates, or rather parodies, movie publicity shots from the 1940s and 50s. The series illustrated the falsity of role-playing as well as contempt for the misguided 'male' audience who would interpret the images as sexy. Her "disguised" self-portraits are also intended to question and challenge cultural stereotypes.
A central focus of her work is the complexities of social interaction and female sexual stereotypes. A theme that runs throughout is the exploration of female identity .In terms of the history and development of female photography she has succeeded in bridging the gap...
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