Kickstarting for Precursor 2

When I was 10 and she was 11, my best friend Age and I spent the day re enacting a Girlfriend Magazine photoshoot frame by frame. We did each other’s makeup and each took turns being model and photographer. Aside from the squeals of embarrassment at seeing these photos again which erupt from my body from a place of abject horror and affection for our former selves, the images are an interesting study of how young females represent themselves through the medium of the image. This was 2004, when front facing cameras had not yet revolutionised self expression in the form of the selfie. The camera these were taken on was a disposable left over from capturing the memories of grade 5 camp, meaning there was little opportunity to take the picture and look back at it before it was developed. This seems to show in the images in how strangely at ease we both look in front of the camera, as the pictures are taken we aren’t constantly checking back at them, fixing our fly aways or wondering how we can stop that slight lazy eye look one does in a selfie when you look at your own face on the screen instead of the camera. But the images are also undeniably strange and unsettling. This is because frame by frame depictions of the actual photoshoot by two normal girls cannot but look like they are trying too hard. Additionally, there is a strangely sexual undertone to a couple of the images, namely the ones depicting us on Age’s bed, lying down looking distant. The adult in me feels a bit of bile in my throat looking at this attempt at hyper sexualising ourselves by creating a carbon copy of a photoshoot we saw in a magazine she was lucky enough to have a subscription to at the time. You can tell I’m much more into the whole thing than Age is, the fact that she doesn’t really want to be there makes the slightly objectifying photo of her looking over her shoulder vulnerably look even worse. She’s posed in an even more extreme sense since she didn’t really want to be the model as much as me. Characteristically, I seem to lack the stiltedness of Age’s discomfort in my photos due to the fact that I was and still am the more precocious child.

What I’m interested in here is the gaze that inflects these photographs. In the context of Age’s driveway, working with the limited materials we had to make magic (i.e.. Her mum’s makeup and avocado face mask) the shots are as faithful to the magazine spread as they could possibly be. Therefore, the strange, hyper sexual gaze that seems to inflect magazine spreads depicting young girls posing docile on beds, eating chocolate, frolicking in fabric, is present in our photos. On the other hand, our photos we taken without an audience in mind. Had we taken these about 4 years later, there is no doubt they would have been published on Myspace and we would have the biases of a specific audience in mind. But our pictures were for our eyes only. This means that the gaze inflected and inflicted on these photos is perhaps our own, a projection of our own normative ideas of what it is to be pretty or beautiful.  Finding these photos is also a massive bonus for my instagram artefact as now I have more historical source material to draw from to create my fake posts. I’m excited by this.