• Corpus ID: 211169146

Urban Exposures

@inproceedings{Allmark2002UrbanE,
  title={Urban Exposures},
  author={Panizza Allmark},
  year={2002}
}

• P. Allmark
• Published 2002
• Art

Unlike the traditional notion of the sublime, which is a masculine aesthetic, my photographic work explores the uncanny, a feminist counter aesthetic, and the urban environment. I describe my work as a photographie feminine, writing the traces of the feminine body. Importantly I address the contradictions and dichotomies of the feminine that exist within the periphery of the city. Key terms: uncanny, photography, sexuality, feminine, night. The city is a place of paradox. The city offers multiple contrasts and possibilities for the street wanderer. It offers a sensual experience. The city is, as Elizabeth Wilson (1991, p. 7), declares both “ ‘masculine’ in its triumphal scale, its towers and vistas and arid industrial regions” which can be interpreted as the urban sublime and it is “ ’feminine’, in its enclosing embrace, in its indeterminacy and labyrinthine uncentredness” which can be associated with the uncanny. My work draws on the analysis of Cixous (1976) and Giblett (1996) on the uncanny. As suggested by Cixous and Giblett, the indeterminacy and intensity of the uncanny as a counter-aesthetic has the potential to disrupt the phallocentric order associated with the aesthetic responses to the sublime and the subsequent relationship which establishes the subject and object divide and the masculine ‘achievements’ of repression and sublimation. My encounters with the city as woman and journey photographer attempt to traverse divisions. My journey is bound up with the feminist project of understanding identity and positionality. My photographie féminine, the writing of the traces of the feminine body, provides a space to explore the uncanny; it involves the ‘painted women’. In the literal sense the photographic work concerns images of female sexuality displayed in the urban environment. Importantly I address the contradictions and dichotomies of the feminine that exist within the periphery of the city. I suggest that my postmodernist or feminist landscape photography, incorporating notions of the uncanny as a counter-aesthetic is less a means of defining a place through tight visual control and mastery over the landscape. It is a way of negotiating and representing a landscape in terms of a space that is open to possibilities. The uncanny is the feminist counter-aesthetic that is evoked in my photographs of the city. Freud (1958), who developed a detailed account of the uncanny, suggests that the uncanny can be associated with an overpowering female sexual ‘force’. The uncanny is the ‘unhomely’. It is a ‘return to the womb’ which in the patriarchal