Boyer + Factor

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

And She Told Two Friends is an ongoing collaboration that scrutinizes the continued dominance of the heterosexual male point of view in shaping images of women. As female artists, we control the frame and generate images that re-orient the role of the female subject from passive to active. In this group of photographs, we reference familiar themes in the lexicon of the male gaze, many of which are common to the point of cliché —women bathing, women as barmaids, women in the garden, girls on couches.

The women in these photographs take up their familiar positions, but instead of remaining the passive vessels of erotic visual pleasure that we have come to expect, they actively address their visualization by giving the finger to the viewer. The simple insertion of an obscene gesture, a signifier of aggression, into the frame serves to disrupt these pictorial tropes. This project is both subversive and playful in its attempt to rebut the presumption of the male gaze and its subliminal aspiration toward perpetuating its own agenda. The images defy the way we’ve been conditioned to receive them.

 

And She Told Two Friends is a collaboration between Margaret Reid Boyer and Jodie Factor who are 1996 graduates of SVA’s MFA program in Photography and Related Media. They shoot on film with a medium format camera because this classic technology allows them to capture detail and color in a way that lends authenticity to each image. They currently live in an old shoe and spend much of their time raising seven children including three sets of twins (and a dog.)