Gender Equality and Its Effect on Advertisement and Fashion Photography

Are men and women equal? Do we view them in the same way in photography? After all, Women are from Venus and Men and from Mars, correct?

In this essay, I am going to be discussing what gender is and how the equality of gender has progressed and developed over the past years. I am going to talk about what feminism is, and I am also going to be talking about how I feel gender has an effect on advertisement and fashion photography and what effect this has on society and how we view ourselves due to the photography that is being given out to the public eyes.

The topic of gender is an extremely strong topic as many people have many very different views on how the two genders should live their life’s and how they should associate with others in their lifetime.

Gender within advertisement photography today is the way we unconsciously influence people within society and create a false stereotype within their minds in which they feel they need to exceed.

While the use of female models within advertising photography practice is highly common, male models are now common practice of advertisers. A massive topic within Advertising photography is how it influence are younger women of the world of how they should look, this topic has created so much conflict around the world on how advertisers shouldn’t be using “unreal” looks to advertise their products.

But what we don’t take into mind as much is how these images effect the men around us just as much. Advertising dictates what the modern man should be like, look like, how they should treat women, how to be successful, they have the same effect on women just as they do men.

After doing lots of research on multiple different topics, for example suicides within the famous industry, the specifications of being a model, the uses of models within the fashion advertising industry, they number one cause of all of these is photography and how it gives an image to society of “how you need to be”.

There are two different forms of signalising gender, the first one being feminism.

After doing research on the topic I found this website https://www.forbes.com/sites/kathycaprino/2017/03/08/what-is-feminism-and-why-do-so-many-women-and-men-hate-it/. The website helped me gain and understanding on what feminism is.

Feminism is when a person does not agree that both sexes should be different, they believe that a woman should be completely equal, and have equal right to a man. Feminists believe that feminism will create equality.

There is also a society dominated by the idea of patriarchy, this is a society dominated by men, communication is filtered through men and therefor means that in this idea men are in control.

What effects does photograph have on society? Photography is a form of expressing emotion through people’s eyes. Where ever you go you will always see some form of photography whether it is in a newspaper, or on an advertisement board. I personally feel like imagery has become a way for people to escape for reality in to a sort of dream world. As Ansel Adams once quoted “In photography there is a reality so subtle that it becomes more real than reality.”

What influences society? I feel the answer to this question is photography, photography influences modern day society. Everywhere we go there is photographs advertising certain products and services, I feel like this makes people want to dress and look like the models in the advertisements. For example, if somebody sees an image of a man or women wearing a new coat they instantly are attracted to the coat and feel as if they need to buy it. Another example is when people see a picture of a car advertisement, they feel they need the car to look ‘cool’ and attractive. If advertisement didn’t contain photographs people would purchase the products as much as they do.

What is an audience? An audience is a group of people in which you are trying to advertise your product or service to. By finding out what these certain people like and enjoy you can very effectively advertise your product to them.

What is Advertisement photography? Advertisement photography is a photography that is used to promote a product or a service, in doing this correct many people will want to purchase the service you are trying to sell.

How do these two topics connect? When doing any form of advertisement photography whether its advertising a car or advertising some makeup, your audience is obviously your main subjects. You want to impress these people with the photographs you are using to advertise a product.

So what is gender equality? Gender equality in principle is where men and women have equal rights, equal responsibility and equal empowerment. Gender equality is trying to alter the structures in society, for example women are sensitive and weak and should be working in a household environment, whereas men are strong and powerful and should be working in industrial environments.

Unfortunately, even for us today, Men and Women still have stereotypical views placed upon, them which makes them still un equal. The fight for equality in men and women have been a big topic for years. But there was a time where men and women were very unequal, the biggest difference was when women didn’t have the right to vote.

Obviously, the deference’s between men and women have been a big problem for years and years, but eventually women gained the courage to start fighting for their equal rights against men. It all started in the 1848, many woman, and even a few men decided to gather and discuss the issues within women’s rights. After much discussion, they decided that women are individuals that deserved to have their own opinions and rights, this included having the right to vote.

When the Civil war began things came to a halt, but after the war ended the discussion of women’s rights were raised again, alongside the right for black men to vote. In 1869 a group called the National Woman Suffrage Association formed and they started fighting for an amendment in the equality of men and women.

After years of trying to fight for the right to vote by saying ‘men and women are equal because they were created the same’, they decided to change their strategy and fight for right because ‘women are different to men’.

This argument helped many political programs, for example the Temperance Advocates wanted women to have the right to vote as they thought it would activate a massive voting bloc on their behalf.

In 1867, John Stuart Mill projected an amendment that would give women the right to vote on the same terms as men but unfortunately it was rejected by 194 votes to 74. After this rejection happened this gave the campaign energy to carry on and fight for what they wanted. After 1888 women gained the right to vote in many small council elections.

On the 18th of august 1920, the 19th amendment of the U.S constitution decided to grant women the right to vote. On the 2nd on November, in the same year, more than eight million women across the US voted in the election for the very first time. It took more the 60 years for the other 12 states to approve the 19th amendment. Mississippi was they very last one to achieve this, doing this on the 22nd March 1984.

Although this was a massive step in history it was also a big step for photography as photography captured the whole process of women gaining power and rights. This meant that women started to appear more in photography widespread, meaning that types of photography such as fashion photography began to be produced more often.

Gender is something we see in photography all the time but it may not initially register in are brains as to how much of an impact the gender in the picture has on it as a whole. When we look at images it is normal for us to see women in heels and pretty dresses. And to see men in suits with ties. But obviously gender affects all genres of photography in different ways.

In the 21st century advertisers have use the differences between men and women to create conflict and create series of persuasive images for the public. Not only do advertisers themselves view men and women differently , but they also bring different aspects to advertisement photography, there for having a man in the image compared to having a woman in the image has completely different meaning to it.

A lot of studies have been done to attempt to that women are ‘better’ then men. There were also facts proving that women were better than men in some places like stamina, but studies mainly focused on differences between women and men, instead of similarities.

It is very normal these days to see a beautiful and attractive woman appearing in an advertisement for male customers o a perfect, flawless woman in an advertisement for a female product.

Many magazines often divide the public into female readership and male readership. There are magazines for teenage boys and teenage girls separately, and their content and language are often gender stereotypic (Willemsen, 1998).

Some famous magazines like Elle and Bazaar provide famous fashion for women all around the world. It seems that magazines like Playboy, FHM have excluded female readers and only focused on supposed male interests.

As the development of mass media goes on, the focus has transferred from advertisements on newspapers and magazines to those on radios or television. Pictures, music, characters and elaborately designed plots can be very effective persuaders, while language remains to be fundamental as a communicative device in human society. Previous scholars have made quantitative studies on gender.

When doing my own research on some advertisement photographs, I came across a photography named Jo Uriarte. Uriarte produced a series of images in which he names ‘ The men under the influence ’. This series of images shows heterosexual males dressed up in their female partners clothing. When we initially look at these images they obviously don’t seem ‘normal to us as the men aren’t dressed in masculine clothing, but why do we think this way? It is because for years it has been pushed into our head that men and women have certain types of clothing that they can wear, so when we see someone wearing something that doesn’t comply with this it seems unusual to us.

Below is a picture created and taken by Jo Uriarte. In this picture, he has gotten a male figure dressed up in women’s clothing and the setting of the image is in a kitchen. I feel like this image is trying to fight against the stereotypical views on men and women as most people have a view that women should be in the kitchen. I feel like the photographer is using this image to try and push forward the view that men and women can do the same jobs and there shouldn’t be certain jobs assigned to a certain gender.

Underneath is another photograph, this photograph was captured Rion Sabean, the name of the picture is “Men-Ups!”. In this image, we have a man holding power tools, which is stereotypically classed as a ‘male job’. But the twist to this image is that the man is not doing a very masculine pose. The posture the man has is very feminine, which once again makes me think that this image was created to try and contradict the ‘ stereotypical ‘ view that society has.

I feel like both of these artists have typed to go against stereotyping within adverting. They have both done this successfully and I feel their images are quite powerful and have a lot of meaning to them.

A very famous fashion photographer that gender has a big impact on his images is Richard Avedon. The very famous American fashion photographer , was known for breaking the photography boundaries in the fashion and political world. Ranging from work found in Vogue to the New Yorker, Avedon could capture the pure emotion and a unique essence of his subjects that many other photographers failed to do.

A lot of Avedon’s works consists of fashion photography advertising a lot of dresses, as you can see in the image above Avedon has used a young attractive lady to advertise this very flawless flowing dress. When we initially look at this image it seems normal to us, a woman advertising a dress. But why is it that we can’t have a man advertising a dress. I feel like this is because woman is classed as elegant so there for work perfectly to advertise a beautiful dress.

Richard Avedon was passionate about photography and devoted his life to capturing the reality of his subjects. He is one of the most famous photographers of all time because of his ground breaking photographic techniques and push towards turning photography into more than just pictures by expanding the fashion world and turning the photography genre into a unique art form.

Another famous fashion photographer is David Lachapelle. Who is Lachapelle? David Lachapelle is an American photographer who is mostly well known for he very unusual commercial fashion photography, such as Angelina Jolie. His work is often full of humorous remarks and they are often very provocative. Lachapelle often uses high amount of nudity in his advertising images. Helmut Newton added “ A lot of the nudity is just gratuitous. But someone who makes me laugh is David Lachapelle, I think he is very bright, very funny, and good” . Being an enthusiastic user of pop culture, Lachapelle is also inspired the history of art, contently using iconic compositions or poses in his imagery. His imagery is presented in the collection of the Los Angeles County Museum of Art, the National Portrait Gallery in London and many other famous art galleries around the world.

As you can see from the image above, David Lachapelle’s imagery contains bright and colourful subjects and backgrounds making the images stand out from any other fashion photography I has seen before. In the image I have selected you can Cleary see that he has used a female and a young child as subjects in the image. The background set up in the image is what it looks like a housing estate. I feel like this image is using a lot of connect that stereotypes has create, using a women in a house hold environment. In the images both the girls are wearing pink, I feel like he has used this because the colour pink is ‘classes’ as a feminine colour.

Above is another one of Lachapelle’s images, but this image is the complete opposite to the first image I showed. The woman in the image is dressed is very revealing, feminine clothing. But then she is holding a chainsaw, which stereotypically is viewed as a mans tool. I feel that Lachapelle has created this image to create a more contradictive set up. If you also look at the background in this image it seems it is an office set up. This is also classed as a more male background to be in.

When it comes to taking a photograph, we don’t realise we do it but when we pick a certain type of photography to photograph we associated it with a specific gender. For example, when you see motorbike picture 9 out of 10 times there will be a male figure in the picture as we class motorbike as a more masculine sport. Whereas if you looked in a makeup magazine the majority of the time you will see a woman modelling the makeup. This is just how are society works and has created a very stereotypical view of men and women.

It is not just advertisement photography that gender affects, it affects all different types of photography including documentary photography and many more. But why does gender effect advertisement photography so much. When we see advertisements everywhere we go are initial thought isn’t, “oh look, a woman advertising a clothing line”. Are initial thought is “them clothes look really nice”, but having a certain gender in the images builds us up to the decision of buying the product for sale. If a company is trying to sell a new skirt they will use a woman as a model as it automatically attracts women into the shop. Whereas if a shop was trying to advertise a pair of men’s jeans they wouldn’t use a female model, they would most probably use a masculine male as are brains are wired up so this is normality to us.

As i stated in the start of my essay gender equality has been a big issue in society for many years, whether it is have certain jobs selected to be ‘ acceptable ‘ for different gender, or whether it’s the stereotypically view of using women to model dresses in fashion photography. Why is it that we think of a man when we think of motor bike, that we associate a woman with makeup? This is because even today men and women still aren’t entirely equal and there for we are still using photography in a very stereotypical way. So yes, gender does play a great role in photography and always shall do.

So overall, yes, gender has a massive impact on all different forms of advertisement imagery. Next time you look at a photograph using a person as a model, image what the image would be like if they used the opposite gender.