She also rejects the idea that her female subjects are merely internalising the male gaze, countering the arguments of John Berger in his influential Ways of Seeing : “Men act and women appear. “I’ve had many people tell me my work replicates the male gaze. Jacobs tells AnOther “a straight male version of the female nude is accepted and elevated by the art world, whereas photographs of authentic female desire by women artists are threatening … the art world tends to only reference lesbianism when it is the fantasy of a male photographer.”
For that reason, some of her works were recently removed from the exhibition seeingWOMEN, shown alongside Helmut Newton’s work at FotoNostrum Gallery in Barcelona. Yet ironically, her work is often trapped in the politics of the male gaze. My work is about listening to these women because I didn’t have the voice to express my own longings for so long.” Underpinning her work is a motive to give visibility to what is repressed, to acknowledge desires that are unmediated by – or even indifferent to – the male gaze. “Longing to me is the most important component of my work. Jacob’s work undeniably raises questions about social attitudes towards female desire, which often render self-possessing and unashamed female sexuality taboo. “For me the most important thing is to give the woman in the photograph the agency, allowing her to express and experience what she desires. ” For Jacobs, such labels fail to encompass the diversity of sexuality, especially those of the queer community and the individuals whom she photographs regularly. If it was up to me, I would replace them with the empowered gaze and disempowered gaze. “I really think that terms such as male gaze and female gaze are fraught. In contemporary terms, the ‘female gaze’ denotes an active mode of voyeurship, but Jacobs would prefer to change the semantics altogether. There is something about authentic expressions of female desire that scares people.”įor Jacobs, sensuality and sexuality exist beyond the reductive binary of active male versus passive female. “I’ve had mentors tell me that if I publish certain images my career will be over, or publishers who have walked away from projects after loving and supporting my work for years. But by gatekeeping what can be defined as ‘high art’, museum and gallery professionals have opted for desexualised expressions of female and queer desire, which ultimately repeats the historical marginalisation and silencing of the LGBTQ+ community. Her work – which centres on expressions of female sexuality – is regularly censored by gallerists and curators, many of whom believe her work slips into the sullied realms of pornography. ” This idea is so entrenched in feminist thought – and our culture more broadly – that still today, nearly 50 years since the publication of Mulvey’s essay, the female nude remains a contested symbol.Īmerican photographer Renée Jacobs explores this tension directly. In the essay Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema (1975), the feminist theorist Laura Mulvey coined the ‘male gaze’, arguing: “ in a world ordered by sexual imbalance, pleasure in looking has been split between active/male and passive/female.
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