Example of photography term paper

Introduction

Hans Bellmar and Cindy Sherman are great photographs whose photographs change the photo industry and influence it in a variety of ways.

HANS BELLMER BIOGRAPHY

Hans Bellmer born on 13 March 1902 in a Kattowitz city, which by then was in the German Empire, but now is Katowice of Poland is a well-known German artist for the pubescent female dollies that he created in the mid-1930s. He started the doll project to be in conflict with fascism of Nazi’s by announcing that his work will not back new German public. A sequence of occasions in Bellmer’s personal life is what the catalyst to his doll project was. Hans Bellmer aggravating a bodily crisis in his dad and bringing his artistic creativeness in association with dislike toward a stark and serious paternal authority and insubordination in his childhood gives him a lot of credit. Other personal events of his life like attending Jacques Offenbach’s performance of Tales of Hoffmann, in 1932 coming across a good-looking teenage cousin and receiving his old toys in a box made him start constructing his first dollies whose design was a young girl.
Bellmer’s work welcomed in Parisan art culture of that time specifically by Surrealists who are around Andre’ Breton. This was because of the youthful sexualization form of the feminine beauty. The journal Minotaure that is the Surrealists’ started publishing his photographs in 5 December 1934. Historians of photography and art take him for Surrealist photographer. Hans Bellmer died on 23 February 1975.

CINDY SHERMAN BIOGRAPHY

Cindy Sherman (date of birth January 19, 1954) is an American film director and photographer, commonly associated with her portraits that are conceptual in nature. She was born in Glen Ridge, New Jersey and was the youngest of five children. Sherman became attracted to visual arts where she began painting at Buffalo State College. The medium’s limitations frustrated her. Because of this, she opt for photography since she realized she will use a camera and put her time into an notion instead of copying other art. The remainder of her college life she spent it focusing on photography. Even though she did not pass a necessary photography class when she was a first year, she redid the course with her friend Barbara Jo Revelle . Barbara whom she thanks for familiarizing her to conceptual art and other modern-day forms. She also created an arts center Hallwalls with Robert Longo and Charles Clough. It was at Buffalo that Sherman started exposing herself to contemporary art that at Albright-Knox Art Gallery. Sherman lives and works in New York.

Hans Bellmar’s photographs

Hans Bellmar is a Surrealist photographer. His works feature the component of surprise, non sequitur, and unexpected juxtapositions. He takes his works as a manifestation of movements of philosophy primarily, with the photographs being artifacts. The dolls of his photographs are cut into pieces and the pieces are put back together in different conformations. He developed pictures of the female body that are sexy and which are cut up, are distorted, or are menaced in disturbing scenarios. He then uses a description format, where he photographs the dollies in sexual positions that are often grotesque in nature. The images he portrays involve decay and death, longing and abuse.
Bellmar’s photos are of mainly naked dolls. The fetishizing part of the bodies and division of their sexual arrangement ignores physical actuality’s constraints. His photo conveys a sense of taboo that lays hidden in the darkness of the soul (where the taboo is distant from safe) but not what convection conveys.
Bellmar’s photos set up a spiritual trauma that is free from known coding and habit due to his psychological violence and confrontation . His photos brought horrible wants out of darkness and into thought making us assimilate our passion in full reality and the evil content in them. This opens up the body’s capability to invent, dream and imagine.
The dolls in Bellmar’s photos were of little girls who were either fully naked or half-naked wearing only an undershirt. Bellmar takes a photo of the doll alone but in one unusual photo, Bellmar would position himself next to his sculpture that stands but his presence is ghostly, as his body appears to dematerialize as his doll girl takes a troubling reality.

Cindy Sherman’s photographs

Cindy Sherman deals with conceptual portraits. This is where the idea or concept is the most significant aspect of the art. So all her portraits involve decision-making and planning beforehand and their finishing is a perfunctory matter. This is where the idea, which is the machine, creates the art.
Sherman’s photos have a long custom that recalls theatrical role-playing and self-portraiture in art. She makes use of the camera and different tools of everyday cinema like costumes, makeup and, stage scenery, which recreates iconic snapshots or common illusions that represent various ideas of self-confidence, public celebrity, entertainment, sexual adventure, and other communally endorsed, existential conditions. These images quickly start to unfold in different ways, which suggest the way self-identity is frequently an uneven compromise between personal intention and social dictates.
The many different self-portraiture methods of Sherman share a single, notable characteristic. She directly confronts the watcher’s gaze in a large number of her portraits not even in the portrait of sex dolls that pose. This puts forward that an underlying fondness for deception is perhaps the one value that bonds us truly.
Photography in the hands of Sherman simultaneously criticizes its obvious subject and constructs it as well which was for long considered a medium, which reflects reality with exactness. Here, Sherman’s exceptional method of portrait photography acts in one part, as the uneven nature of photographic perception.

COMPARISON AND CONTRAST BETWEEN HANS BELLMAR ANDCINDY SHERMAN PHOTOGRAPHS

Both photographs represent an era or time period in their lives and in history. Hans Bellmar’s photographs represented his; childhood period when his parents were strict and very harsh, the period when he met his beautiful cousin who was a teenager and when he saw his toys again in a box. For Cindy Sherman some of the photos represent a period in her life when she was young and juvenile especially the photos where she looked young. In history, the Hans Bellmar’s photos represent a period that is of the Nazis. The Nazi era is full of cruel acts, which affect the people especially the girl child negatively. The photos of the doll girl that has no arm or leg are examples since that is what the soldiers were doing . For Sherman
Both of Hans’s and Cindy’s photos did not involve men. This is because in the photos it is only females who pose fro as in Bellmar’s photo it was a girl while Sherman’s was a woman.
Both of the photos tell stories about something. Bellmar’s photos tell stories of the gruesome acts of the Nazi soldiers during his time and of how girls were treated. An example is of the doll that has both arms cut and is lying on the floor half-naked. For Sherman, the untitled#225 photo tells a story of Judith leaving a tent of Holofemes in the year period 1495-1500. She left the tent with a head of a human suggesting it was Holofemes head.
Both Bellmar’s and Sherman’s photos depict that the woman is weaker compared to men. Belllmar’s photos show us how the woman is not treated wells since they get hurt and tortured. Sherman’s photo tries to give the woman a voice of her own in the male-dominated world. Here the woman is under oppression from men who control everything.
Both Bellmar and Sherman have sexualized their photos. On one hand Bellmar sexualizes his dolls by making them to have breasts, hips, long hair and they are not in clothes or also half-naked. Thus, he displays their feminism in the photos. On the other hand Sherman sexualizes herself in the photos by wearing sexy clothes, sexy poses and also being fully or half-naked like in the fashion untitled#276 and renaissance women untitled#205 respectively.
Hans Bellmer’s portrait mainly uses the girl child. All of his photographs use girl dolls to depict what he is wants to inform the public about. He was preoccupied with small girls as his focuses for art, which moreover, concurred with his surreal idealism of the femme-enfant, which considering its association with double realms of femininity, childhood and alteration encouraged male artists. Cindy Sherman uses a woman in all her photos. She uses a woman as she tries to make women hero’s . This is done through her posing in various circumstances. She also accomplishes this through not giving them titles, which makes the subject issue similar, but at the same time also toying with our minds hence making us to remember her heroines.
Hans Bellmer’s photos focus on political occurrences. He refused to create artwork that supports the German administration at that time, so he created arts that were opposing the German government . This made him escape from the government in Berlin. His photographs portray all this rebellious acts he commits to save his people from the treacherous regime. Cindy Sherman’s photo focuses on fashion trends and iconic figures. In her photographs, Cindy Sherman changes how she looks to come up with scenes from magazines, movies, and history. She explores subjects of representation and identity in her work. She facilitates this through an arsenal of costumes, wigs, prosthetics, makeup, and props. She also alters the environment in which she poses that helps in impersonating the character she wants. An example is the photograph impersonating Carte Blanche.
Hans Bellmer uses dolls in his photographs. His use of dolls is first due to his childhood. The dolls connect him to his hard childhood times. Second, Bellmer has a problem of desire and the doll is an important section that makes him want to resolve it. To solve the problem he has a two-step answer, which involves repositioning the female body making it unable to feel pleasure, second is to rip to pieces, which will enable him, learn its mysteries. Bellmer compares the female body to a sentence that has no end, which invites a person to rearrange it. Cindy Sherman uses herself when it comes to photography. She did this basing one of her reasons on trying to look for clues on which person she actually is. Sherman embraces contradictions simply, since the photos she takes of herself are self-portraits that show how the camera’s wisdom of not lying. Nevertheless, to her, her camera always seemed to be lying, so through her deceptions, she looks realities about vulnerability, identity, and power. Cindy Sherman says that dressing up in different personalities is a way of keeping her occupied and it is a way she uses to escape certain psychological issues like if someone does not like a particular version of her would they like the other varieties of her. This is because she says she felt that she is a latecomer of the family when already the family has four kids. Sherman agrees that all of this is just a way of examining gender and identity, which she relates to being deep-rooted to her childhood confusions and the 19760s and 1970s political evolution.
Hans Bellmer’s photographs are to create a kind of gruesome, grotesque, frightening, and weird picture. The fact that he uses naked dolls of little girls, makes one question his interest in little girls, raising questions on his obsession with little girls and what he would do to a real little girl if he comes across one? The horrifying nature of the photographs is because of him using doll that either do not contain one part of the body for example the head, one or both legs, and one or both arms. This brings out a sense of horror . An example of this is his photograph of the doll that does not have both arms and is lying on the floor helpless with its head twisted. Cindy Sherman’s photographs are there to make one create fantasies. This is because in her photos she stares directly at the person seeing it making them to start fantasizing. This especially happens when it comes to men, who find that it depicts one’s fantasy woman or dream girl. The seductive postures and sexy fabrics and clothes are a plus that help create that fantasy.
Hans Bellmer photographs are surreal in nature. Surrealism is a mode of expressing art that releases the subconscious uninhibited imagination. Bellmer’s photos bring out unexpected imagination that is restricted by societal limitations and reason. It makes you think out of your comfort zone of which ordinarily you would not. His photographs set out a trauma spiritually and psychologically through the physical hostilities depicted by the photographs. Cindy Sherman is a conceptualist. Her photographs base on an idea, which then creates the basis of photography. For example in Cindy Sherman’s Marylnne Monroe’s photo, the idea was to emulate an icon and to be specific a movie legend icon. She then set everything from makeup, wardrobe, background, and hairstyle to go in line with the idea. Sherman’s photographs do not induce that thinking out of the comfort zone.
Hans Bellmer works only concentrate on the present time where he addresses issues current at his time but not in the past or the future. Cindy Sherman’s works represent all periods from the past to the present and the future. Her latest works focuses on the future where there is uncertainty and a period of transition in Western women’s lives. The period of procreation and sexual attraction seems to be done for these women. This is because these women are heading to a period when their active and previously betrothed lives are slowing down. This shows that she also dwells on the future. Regarding the past, she impersonates women of the past like Marilyn Monroe. Regarding the present, she impersonates current women like Demi Moore. As a result, she represents all timelines.
Both Hans Bellmer and Cindy Sherman express a variety of issues in their photographs. Hans’s images depict matters of decay, violence, and perverse sexuality. Nakedness of the dolls shows decay that implies how bad the society has become. Dolls having no heads or arms shows violence, meaning that in that period there is a war that is going on. Exposure of breasts, hips, and private parts of the dolls shows perverse sexuality. However, in Hans’s photographs the component of sexuality is overdone and is present in all photographs. Also in Hans’s photographs, a single photo cannot explain a single issue alone ignoring other issues. Sherman’s photographs also depict a variety of matters but the difference to Han’s is that one photograph can explain a single issue only for example beauty. Her photographs can as well depict several issues in one photo.
Hans Bellmer’s works emphasize on marvelous, mysterious, mythological, and irrational things in order to make art strange and ambiguous. Hans’s interest in nudeness, girl dolls, his idea of opening up the human brain to the unfathomable and the desire to explore female sexuality to levels that are not reachable by other humans makes his work mysterious. It also makes his work marvelous in a way that it makes it interesting and the idea that a person thinks like that makes it even more marvelous. The fact that he wants to explore more of the female sexuality makes his work a myth since he believes there is more to female sexuality than just what we see or hear about. This also makes his work irrational since he wants to remove the barrier untying a woman to her image based on no logical explanation considering the impossibility of what he wants to do. Cindy Sherman’s work emphasizes on what she feels is interesting to her. Unlike Hans’s work, her work is rational, not ambiguous, not mysterious, but straightforward and it is marvelous and splendid.
Cindy Sherman work has both used modern and old techniques of photography. Her work uses black and white color system of photography from the older days and uses the colored system of photography of the current days. Therefore, her work because of this shows the transition between new and old and can give the differences between the two eras. When comparing her work to Hans’s, Hans’s work only comprises of photography techniques from the older days hence it does not have anything that associates it to the new era of photography. His works comprise of photographs that are in black and white only. Therefore, Hans’s works are more of relics.

Conclusion

After comparing and contrasting Hans Bellmer’s and Cindy Sherman’s works of photography, they have attributes that are common and different from one another.