2006 Alumni Brigitte Lustenberger Shortlisted for Belfast Photo Festival
From Brigitte Lustenberger
“My zine will be on view at the festival. ‘A Gaze of One‘s Own’ is a work about my photographic explorations of the female naked body. In the history of photography naked women have been photographed almost exclusively by men. My gaze is shaped by these photographs which are based on male ideas, desires, and fantasies of a woman’s body. I ask myself: Do I even have my own view of my own body? How can I recognize stereotypical views of the female body and deconstruct them to make them my own? How to overcome the male gaze or gender posing? Is it even possible? It is – as Laura Mulvey puts it – «the ultimate challenge: how to fight the unconscious structured like a language, while still caught within the language of the patriarchy.
I photograph myself, my own body, because I cannot objectify myself. Taking and making images becomes almost a performative gesture. I want to reflect on my own seeing: What one sees, how, when and why. And make this perceptible through art.”