the feminine identity

Long before and still after in art and our culture, when it comes to provocative imagery of children, find reminiscence of JonBenet--

“Role Models”: To emulate, perhaps — to contemplate, definitely
By Chris Klimek
12/7/08

"WASHINGTON – The 20th century didn’t introduce the notion of gender as a malleable value, but it certainly brought the examination of shifting gender identity fully into public view. What freaked out the squares in Shakespeare’s time continues to freak them out in ours, which must come as a relief to the 18 artists whose narrative photographs and portraiture comprise “Role Models,” a collection of 70 provocative pictures on view at the National Museum for Women in the Arts.

Subtitled, “Feminine Identity in Contemporary American Photography,” the show is bracing and provocative even when it’s inscrutable. The show cleanly delineates two generations of female photographers. The first, emerging in the early 1980s (Sally Mann, Mary Ellen Mark, Laurie Simmons) was born between 1940 and 1960, thus coming of age just as the “second wave” of the feminist movement was gathering steam.

Sally Mann’s photos of young girls, including her own daughters, putting on makeup and posing with candy cigarettes are almost certainly more unsettling now than when she made them, 20 to 25 years ago. In the wake of the case of JonBenet Ramsey, the six-year-old beauty pageant contestant whose still-unsolved 1996 murder brought the issue of the sexualization of children to the forefront of public debate, it’s difficult to look at Mann’s work and think of anything else.

The five 1996-7 photos from Anna Gaskell — one of nine photographers who comprise the second generation in “Role Models —explore the wonder and mystery of childhood, too, inspired more by the Brothers Grimm and Lewis Carroll than by any real-world notions of beauty or sexuality...."