Dial "P" for Panties: Narrative Photography in the 1990s (original) (raw)

2000, Comparative Technology Transfer and Society

This essay was originally published in 1999, at the height of the art world's interest in photographs of adolescent girls. In it, Soutter provides one of the few accounts that took this work seriously, offering conceptual frameworks within the history of art photography as well as attempting to understand its seductive quality via the context of fashion and pornographic photography. Soutter argues for the importance of understanding the narrative ambiguity of these staged photographs, and traces the possible routes for reading these images of girls as critical of or complicit with the sexualised imagery of girlhood found in popular culture. Whilst Soutter concludes that these practices manipulated an appearance of criticality, she presciently points to many of the routes that have since been pursued in other essays in this collection, which situate representations of girlhood within a more complex critical framework. Her comments on nudity and the parthenogenic nature of celebrity indicate some of the ways in which these photographs of girls can be read as delicately balanced postfeminist representations, a possibility which Soutter more fully acknowledges in her afterword, written a decade after this article was first published. As a photographer, an art historian and a feminist, I have been bothered for some time by a particular strand of contemporary photography. It started as a joke: I had seen so many quasinarrative art photographs of half-dressed young women that I began referring to them as their own genre, 'panty photography'. As with many inside jokes, once I had coined the term, I began to find validation for it everywhere. Panties seemed to be proliferating in art galleries and magazines. The New York Times ran an article about the current cross-over between art, fashion and pornography, and shortly thereafter an article about hot young female artists and their hot new work. 1 The phenomenon came to a well-publicised head in a spring 1999 exhibition at Lawrence Rubin-Greenberg Van Doren Fine Art in New York City. Another Girl, Another Planet, curated by Gregory Crewdson and Jeanne Greenberg Rohatyn, included images by thirteen photographers, twelve of them women. The work was mostly colour and primarily figurative and the majority of the photographs depicted women or girls caught in evocative,