The phrase ‘female gaze’ is a fairly recent addition to our cultural vocabulary. Put simply, it refers to the idea that a woman’s gaze is categorically different (even ‘opposite’, as some have argued) to that of a man. In discussions of photography, it’s frequently called on to support claims that images of women by women differ in specific and recognisable ways from those made by men.

But the gaze isn’t the same thing as the eye’s look. Rather than something that is under the control of the individual, the gaze refers to a subject’s wider awareness of ‘being looked at’. Photography is only one link in a long chain of institutions, discourses, and technologies that act together to construct both the gaze and the ideals of gender with which it’s aligned. The male gaze – the convention against which the female gaze is often positioned – is embodied in cultural expectations about the way that women should appear and how they should behave in order to conform to shared standards of femininity. Such standards are shaped and formed in ways that are beyond the individual photographer’s control.

Who better though, to understand the restrictions that society imposes on female selfhood than women themselves? Female fashion photographers are subject to the same unwritten codes of behaviour and appearance as the models they photograph; they deal with the same frustrations and insecurities that go along with the demand to look and act in certain ways. They understand what it means to live in a female body, to identify as feminine. This is not to claim that female photographers differ in essence from their male counterparts. It is, however, to acknowledge that they are positioned differently in relation to their subjects, to the industry in which they work, and to discourses of fashion more generally. To speak of a female view is to recognise a different way of representing femininity – one that incorporates a lived experience of female subjectivity and the conventions that define and delimit it.

‘A Woman’s Eye: Fashion Photography, Femininity and Feeling’, in Female View: Women Fashion Photographers from Modernity to the Digital Age
Antje-Britt Mählmann, ed.
Hardcover, 192 pages
Published by Hatje Cantz (April 2022)
Languages: English, German
ISBN 978-3-7757-5184-1