Nicéphora: the 'Elsewhere', the 'Exotic', the 'Other'... the Woman
Taking Niepce Nicephore’s life's work as a starting point, — Alinka Echeverría has developed a contemporary and analytical approach in examining the medium of photography.
Her newest body of work serves as a series of inventions and discoveries which forge the male and colonial gaze into the way photographic imagery of women is constructed and read. The winner of the 2015 BMW Residency at the musée Nicéphore Niépce, Alinka asks, ‘how has the technological development of photographic apparatus and printing methods, if seen as a functional enterprise, affected the photographic process of ‘other-ing’, and how did their subsequent assimilation influence contemporary gazes?’
Referencing the intrinsic ties between ceramics and photography, Echeverría uses the form of the vase as a metaphor of the feminine to produce several works that explore the way in which images of women have been carried through visual codes and photographic techniques and entered the collective (un)consciousness. The resulting project is a reflection on how we have been conditioned to read images, and how photographers construct them.
LG: This series of images is notably different in style to your emotive portraits and cross-cultural documentations… tell me a little about the creative process of Nicephora.
AE: Yes, its very different to anything I have done before because it’s the first time I have worked on the issue of the female image, a subject that required a different approach and reflection.
When I got to the museum (musee Nicephore Nicepe in France), I asked myself the same question I ask each time I start a project: “Where do I stand?” In photography this can be a question of physical positioning or stylistic approach, but more importantly it’s about political and social stance.
I concluded that the most important aspect of my context was that I was in a museum that was a monument to Nicephore Niepce. He was a visionary inventor who could never have imagined the state of photography today. My idea was to go back to the origins of photography, his invention of the heliogravure technique, which was rooted in his burning desire to fix light on matter and his obsession to infinitely reproduce images.
For me, the artefacts and images held at the museum represent an articulation of his thoughts and imagination. What interested me was all the history surrounding the inventors of photographic and printing techniques. When one looks at these histories we see that it was mostly men working for recognition and economic gain.
At the same time I discovered that Nicephore was actually born ‘Joseph Niepce’. In his early twenties he adopted the name ‘Nicephore’, meaning ‘victorious’ or ‘bearer of light.’ For me this was a clear indication of his interest in Greek mythology, art and philosophy. I started to wonder about how this may have influenced him, and indeed how these classical roots influence contemporary iconography.
In summary – I took Nicephore’s ideas and obsessions as a starting point to explore what interested me at the time – the female image. In the same way he appropriated the meaning of ‘bearer of light’ and made it his own, I feminised ‘Nicephore’ by adding an 'a', thus symbolically reclaiming the origins of photography and the meaning of the word as feminine.
Tell me a little about some of the colonial photographs of your researched through - was the collection extensive? How did some of the works of other photographers influence this survey?
The archive of the museum contains approximately three million images. I became especially interested in the archives of women in the French colonies. I wanted to develop a thought process using these archives as a starting point. I didn’t know if it would simply be inspiration or if I would actually use them. To my surprise I found it a burden and responsibility to appropriate archive and reframe it. At the same time, I very much wanted to reframe the purpose of the photographs I found there. It’s hard to express, but it was a sort of need to liberate them from their boxes….while respecting the archive as a guardian of time I wanted to look back on the history from my contemporary gaze as a practicing image maker.
I was particularly taken by the museum’s collection of the Combier postcard company containing images of young Algerian prostitutes. I was at once shocked by the images and at the same time attracted to them as objects. The images were captivating and timeless, but spoke to me of exploitation and the male construction of the female image - an idealised and exotic woman. How was and is her image constructed? Why is this construction so familiar and so attractive to us ?
Just as Pygmalion sculpted the perfect woman with his hands, the photographers of the colonies immortalised a type of fantasy woman applying their own conception of the ideal, in the ‘elsewhere’, the ‘exotic’, the ‘other’.
The postcard is a medium which emphasises the idea of otherness as a model of desire as they enabled the mass distribution of a piece of information, a message, captured from afar, then sent to the west. During the colonial era the postcard was a form of knowledge and those who received postcards became actors of this knowledge; they are involved and even forced to participate in it.
Each piece references Precession of the Feminine - what is the relevance of this title?
In ‘Precession of the Feminine’ I use 11 images from the archive to create a series which merges photography with ceramics.’ Precession of the Feminine’ reconsiders the way in which the images of women have been carried forward through photographic history by way of visual codes and techniques thus entering into the collective (un)consciousness.
Referring to the intrinsic links between ceramics and photography, I fuse the images with different vases in 3d simulations using the form of the vase as a metaphor of the feminine to reflect upon the way in which we have been conditioned to read images, and how photographers construct them.
In this work, images of women from the archive are blown up so much that the image disappears but the printing technique becomes visible, the medium becomes the message, the vase, the vessel. I linked McLuhan’s ideas to that of Jean Baudrillard, according to who reality no longer exists. We live in a hyper-reality. Contrary to representation, ‘simulation’ claims to be an equivalent of reality, and it is thus an experience of the real. Facts no longer follow their own trajectory, but they follow the trajectory of models which are already in place. These models have their own trajectory, a trajectory “in orbit” as described by Baudrillard. Facts exist in the intersections of these orbital trajectories that they will then follow. I adapted the title of the chapter to “Precession of the feminine”. The female simulacrum will enter into the orbital trajectory of the models of the feminine. It is in this way that women follow a model of being a woman. Women create images of themselves in response to representative and symbolic codes. The existence of the image of the ‘perfect woman’ says it all.
For me there is urgency in this question at a time where our networks are invaded by sexualised selfies, and the image of the woman is shaped by the representations disseminated in magazines, newspapers, the television. Many women are rejecting those constructions and going beyond representation, for me one of those women is Serena Williams, whose image I use as a metaphor for the triumph of breaking paradigms. ‘Precession’ speaks of rotation and movement - codes and semiology evolve at the same time as our society itself evolves. Ultimately Nicephora is optimistic.
Tell us a little about the work ‘White Ink’ [featured image]
White Ink is a reference to the ‘encre blanche’ coined by feminist writer Hélène Cixous. It represents the milk that all women possess, every woman being a mother. For her, this milk is the voice that each woman has within her, and that she must express through writing. I transfer her ideas to photography to ask: Can the male and colonial gaze be disentangled from photographs of women ? What does a feminine gaze mean, when according to Cixous, all the structures of writing and language are part of the patriarchal system?
During the making of this work, I was aware of playing with the very codes I am reflecting upon. Did I sexualise my photos with red varnish? Or did I successfully exploit a cultural code of interpretation? The image of the woman is created by that of the photographer.
Lastly, the white refers to the white canvas of the artist and to the white canvas we are all at our birth. It is the ‘projections’ we receive through society, family, education and media that colour our vision and construct our interpretation of codes and symbols, the image of ourselves and others.
Where have you witnessed the male and colonial gaze interlink in relation to either your work or personal experiences?
The male and colonial gaze is very entangled with photography. Its very hard to separate it. The language we use: ‘shoot’ , ‘shot’ , ‘capture’, is violent . The apparatus is very much a model of the eye, how it calibrates images and light is very closely linked to the physiology of seeing, in that respect photography was created in the image of ourselves as visual beings. To me the ‘camera obscura’ is an analogy of the ‘mind’s eye’. Therefore, I think that the fact that the apparatus and printing techniques were invented mostly by men affected the medium a lot.
Is the male gaze to be found amongst women photographers too?
Yes absolutely. In the same way that a colonial gaze can come from practitioners working in colonised countries (indeed I think they often propagate them), the male gaze is propagated by women taking selfies using the codes of the sexualised images, and also used by women practitioners. This is often unconscious, its how we are taught, its what we absorbed from our photographic ancestry. To break away from that and evolve or really find your own voice takes a lot of awareness, reflection and reinventing the use of the apparatus. The apparatus itself, the way images are disseminated and crucially, the encoded gaze of the viewer on the work is part of the same system of photography as a functional enterprise, most often with an economic motive.
It’s very rare that I see a very feminine gaze in a lens based photographic artist. Viviane Sassen would be an example that comes to mind.
Do you think your personal history ever works its way into your practice? And how?
In this case definitely. I don’t think you can separate biography from the work when it’s a self reflexive project. Nicephora is really about women and photography, so it is inseparable from the fact that I am a female photographer from a country with a violent colonial history.
Questions about the male and colonial gaze have been in my head for a long time and I have tackled them before but I never really broke it down like I have in Nicephora. Its been good to apply a critical gaze to my work so explicitly. I had the privilege to be taught by amazing teachers in northern england that made sure the students radically refused to believe anything just because it was in a text book on or TV. We were encouraged to debate and argue everything and double check sources and understand subjectivity.
Another subject your work often tackles is the progression of photography in the contemporary age - the lack of physical interaction with photography nowadays can cause many artists to disassociate themselves with the process of making images. Tell me a little about your interaction with photography and post-production.
In Nicephora, I was reflecting on my practice as an image maker. I created collages without post-production. In Precession of the Feminine I worked with a professional retoucher to recreate the visuals I imagined, but did not exist.
For ‘Nicephora’ – the amphora with the image transfer of Serena Williams, I worked with a potter to make a reproduction of a greek amphora out of terracotta, then with expert silk screen makers for the images. In this sense I was not the artisan behind the work as such, but it was my idea manifested.
Going back to Nicephore Niepce, I wanted to show how an invention can follow its own path independently of the desire of its inventor. To come back to my question of “Where do I stand?”, we have to imagine a spiral. The same thing is constantly reinterpreted according to the contemporary context and positioning. Facts are grasped in the contemporaneity of their models. Their meaning, their goal, their utility perpetually change. The image of the woman is in constant evolution, as is our interpretation of it.
You’ve never been known to shy away from a large canvas and it’s often been commented that the dimensions of your photographs are significant to how much you feel to need to express. What kind of comfort do you find in working on such a monumental scale?
I don’t think photography should be limited to print room scale of newspapers and magazines, neither do I think photographs need to be monumental.
Each work has a size at which I feel it works best. My portraits are usually 1:1 scale so we have a sense of direct rapport with the person photographed. In ‘Cradle’ I consciously wanted to make and oversized canvas to recreate the idea of vast landscape I was working in. These were held down with rocks from the land.
Alinka's work will be exhibited until 31 August, 2016 at Les Rencontres de la Photographie, Commanderie Sainte-Luce, Arles Curator: François Cheval
Image credits: Extract from ‘Fieldnotes for Nicephora’
Diverse works on paper from the collections of Nicéphore Niépce museum. Pigment prints, laser prints on tracing paper and photocopies. © Alinka Echeverria, 2015 / Résidence BMW au musée Nicéphore Niépce
