Vanity is the most prevalent theme amongst my images. I spent a lot of time really thinking about the way society depicts vanity, and then critiquing it with our Berger text and then looked at how Ana Mendieta portraits vanity. A lot of her images show the absence or distortion of vanity. In her images it is so obvious that the figure we are looking at are the shapes of a body and there is an absence of her physical body a lot of the time. Even in her self portraiture there is a distortion of her body. She added a mustache to change her appearance and take away from the femininity that vanity often exploits. Changing the way her face looks using stocking or glass. She even utilizes the thing that most art uses when claiming it is vanity, a mirror. Berger explains how renaissance art affects the portrayal of women in art and in general. “You painted a naked woman because you enjoyed looking at her, you put a mirror in her hand and you called it vanity, thus morally condemning the woman whose nakedness you had depicted for your own pleasure.” (Berger, 1972, p. 51) The quote made the mirror presence even more necessary.
The emphasization of the mirror became extremely important to me. The idea of using vanity as a physical object, a mirror, and distorting it the way Mendieta does became important. Emphasizing topics like domestic violence is also something that I wanted to incorporate. So shattering vanity, the mirror, and showing myself in the mirror became the first steps in creating the photo series. I also wanted to replicate the pose Mendieta has in her mustache image where she is looking into a mirror and the image is being taken behind her right shoulder.
Taking the conventional beauty products and using them to also show vanity.
In the process of actually making these images I thought a lot about what Carrie Mae Weems says about how she somehow felt the need to always have to create art that somehow made a difference. In the New York Times Article: How Carrie Mae Weems Rewrote the Rules of Image-Making it is said “We also both shared a sense that our very presence in the world, as human beings who were also black, demanded that we live lives and make work that somehow made a difference, that left the world transformed in some way, and that visualized a piece of that world that was uniquely ours and that participated in a larger cultural conversation inside of the medium of photography.” It was completely intentional for the art to have a very easy to point out message when regarding the violence of the images. I wanted to have a fair representation of what it means to a woman of color, and also be creating art and having that representation within art, even if the artwork isn’t as “pretty" and “admired” like the ones created by the white men in the artworld.
In inspiration of Cindy Sherman I wanted it to feel almost like it was cinematic or theater, I didn’t want it to be like a performance, not only my story being told but a tale as old as time. In the Cindy Sherman Effect they mention “And she played it out incredibly, and then she just used that as the stepping-stone to take it further and further and further out. So much of her work is performance, so much is improvisation, so much is theater.” I wanted a lot of the harsh parts to feel almost exaggerated, just as Cindy Sherman did, and completely resonated with the desire to create these pieces on my own and set the stage on my own, which is why there is no one else in the images and no one really helping guide me. I also took inspiration from the black and white in the untitled film stills, as well as her later works where there are some post production additives.
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