Barbara Hammer Refuses the Male Gaze in 1970s Photographs

This post was curated from an article written by Susan Silas for Hyperallergic

Hammer is known primarily as an experimental filmmaker. At her screening at Electronic Arts Intermix, she revealed she had an archive of approximately 1,000 negatives, many of which had never been printed. Her book, Truant: Photographs, 1970–1979, is culled from that archive, and for an exhibition of the same name, Company Gallery recently displayed 28 modestly scaled black-and-white photographs from the collection.

The peopled images are exclusively of women. These images, dated as they are from the ’70s, may remind us of the tail end of hippiedom — a comfort with nudity combined with rebellious self-representation — but in fact they offer us something more important. Hammer came out in 1970 and her work feels tied to her declaration of independence from dictatorial social norms, as well as her need to be an active agent in her own work of self-definition. If true personal freedom stems from genuinely not caring about what other people think, then there is real freedom from patriarchy in not caring about what men think.

We know that we are constructed by our own will and personalities, but at the same time we are not immune to what is reflected back to us about ourselves by other individuals and the culture at large. Hammer is an optimist. After her screening at Electronic Arts Intermix, she stated in response to a question from the audience, “We’re constructing ourselves.” She has enormous faith in self-creation. This may have been a necessary component of coming out in the ’70s to begin with. If we look back at advertising from the post-war generation on, it is clear how much of the message was about managing female sexuality rather than about simple consumerism, although these two agendas were ultimately tied together in trying to convince women that what they lacked (the phallus, according to Lacan) could be compensated simply by buying the right consumer objects. Later, of course, this strategy was transformed into a complete objectification of female sexuality (as defined by men) to sell every imaginable thing to both women and men.

By contrast, Hammer gives us women who are comfortable in their own skins; who have their own agency and who, like Hammer herself, have refused to be managed. What we feel most keenly in these images is the removal of the scopophilic male gaze. In Laura Mulvey’s brilliant essay “Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema,” published in 1975, Mulvey states: “In their traditional exhibitionist role women are simultaneously looked at and displayed, with their appearance coded for strong visual and erotic impact so that they can be said to connote to-be-looked-at-ness. …The presence of woman is an indispensable element of spectacle in normal narrative film, yet her visual presence tends to work against the development of a story line, to freeze the flow of action in moments of erotic contemplation.”

In Hammer’s images titled “Sappho Production Meeting” and “Shooting Sappho, Los Angeles,” both from 1979, we see an all-female film crew meeting and working, all completely naked. This, it seems to me, is the ultimate refusal of the male gaze as described by Mulvey; one in which women are the producers and actors in their own self-representation and in which nothing about their appearance is dictated by the contemporaneous male-defined expectations of how they should look and what they should be allowed to do. This same sense of refusal may explain Hammer’s attraction to experimental film, where the rules that have been laid down about filmmaking, almost entirely by men, are forsaken.

To read this article in its entirety click here