Well I haven't had much time lately to do much physical work on my project (because of final assignments and exams), but I've certainly been thinking about it a lot in between everything else.
I've been thinking about everything I do in relation to this project, and the most interesting connection that I've come across so far, came about while I was writing an essay on the male gaze in cinema and literature. In thinking about all the ways that women are objectified/aestheticized on screen and in words, I noticed that I'm doing the very same thing with my photographs of trees. I have been doing some photo editing, fragmenting trees into their various parts, leaves, bark, roots, branches... and giving them polished and pristine appearances (sort of a magical progression between light effects and colours) and I noticed that this is exactly what filmmakers and writers are doing to dehumanize women and transform them into fetish objects. In the book Lolita, if you've read it, a young girl's anatomy is fragmented by the author which then causes the reader to inadvertently sympathize with the pedophile who seduces her. She becomes reduced to her various body parts; similar to Hitchcock’s depiction of women, and similar to my photo editing of images of trees.
In a way I felt like I was immorally ripping my trees into pieces just as filmmakers and writers often do with their female characters. It’s strange though in a way to worry about objectifying a tree. A tree seems already to be like something not worthy of moral consideration (in this way anyways). But it felt wrong to me. I had been thinking of trying to represent my thoughts on trees in a truthful way through a visual essay accompanied by my own voice with musical undertones… in a sense getting closer to the spirituality that I see in trees. After thinking about the project in reference to depictions of women in literature and film though, I feel like I’m betraying that whole idea.
I’m thinking now about getting to the bottom of this issue and thinking some more about what exactly I am trying to do by beautifying my images of trees (giving them more than what’s already there, and fragmenting them into abstracted images of the whole). I am really going to consider gender and representation and how this can be applied to something which is completely divorced from the moral human side of things. I am talking about nature, about a plant, and I think it’s really interesting that I am feeling concerned about moral representation. I’m going to do some more reading on gender identification (Freud, Laura Mulvey), and see if maybe I can critique the objectification of women by objectifying a tree. (Sounds like a nifty idea, but I’m going to keep on working through it.)
For now (the next two weeks or so) before I go home for the Christmas Holidays, I’m going to continue with my music-making and photo editing. The photo work has been quite painstaking (I’m making lots and lots of copies of iterations of the same picture with minute changes of colour and light, and I plan on joining them in an imovie montage). The more I work, the more I think, and even though my idea is not solidified at this point, I think I’ve finally figured out my working method… and that is to plod along and let the ideas take shape as I work creatively.
Things are going well, and sorry for the long and unfocused blog, but it really helps me to do it. (Any advice or ideas that you have to offer, I would love to hear)
Thank you.
