Feminism today cannot be the same as it was in the past. The new feminism is stronger because women accept their womanhood, their body, and their maternal power, while before they were forced to deny their identity as a female since it tied them to so many bad memories.
Ever since its invention back in the 19th century, photography has been documenting life. At the same time, it focuses on inviting audiences to a rather subjective world, while trying to be taken seriously as an art form. Photography has always been considered a male-dominated profession, but luckily things are changing. Scholars, writers, bloggers, photography students, and enthusiasts have been giving due to the female pioneers of the field. Most of them were always standing and/or hiding in the shadows, oblivious to how much they could acclaim and accomplish. Arguably, the techniques, concepts, and thematic female photographers use differ from those of male photographers. At a time when most women were convinced that their place was in the kitchen and certainly not in the dark room, some were struggling to surpass their male counterparts and work towards gaining respect and recognition for their work.
Vanessa Beecroft (Italian-born American contemporary performance artist, sculptor, and photographer, 1969-) was born in Genoa and attended Brera Academy in Milan, after high school. Her first art exhibition VB01 (1993) was in a gallery in Milan. It was later featured as a performance with other female students from Brera Academy wearing Beecroft's clothing, and sharing Beecroft's Book of Food, a diary documenting her food consumption from 1985 and 1993. The Book of Food documented Beecroft's bulimic eating habits and was referenced again in her later work, but it was separate from the performances.
She moved to the United States in 1996, at the invitation of art dealer Jeffrey Deitch, settling in New York City. She now lives and works in Los Angeles. Vanessa Beecroft's work has been presented internationally since 1993 and has shaped performance art, the representation of the female body, and sociopolitical discussions about art. Her exhibitions (entitled VB, followed by the number) have been an ongoing practice for over 25 years. Shown in some of the world's most important museums and major contemporary events, Beecroft's exhibitions highlight the tensions between nudity and clothing, constraint and freedom, collective and individual, and human strength and weakness. She was one of the first artists to collaborate with fashion brands, starting in the 1990s, and has collaborated extensively with musician and producer Kanye West since 2009.
Now a member of the popular culture and contemporary art canon, her work also manifests a deep dialogue with the history of art and representations across the traditions of Europe and many other cultures. She is also a passionate practitioner of photography, drawing, painting, and sculpture, using every medium to present perspectives on the body while combining Renaissance influences with modern representation. Her art is a passionate field of experimentation, rooted in history, revealing itself according to its own rules and expanding into the world in which it takes on many philosophical and political overtones to question the meaning of our existence as human beings.
Beecroft's work is unquestionably controversial and her performance work about gender has been critiqued many times in the past. Her performances have been described as art, fashion, brilliant, terrible, evocative, provocative, disturbing, sexist, and empowering. The primary material in her work is the live female figure, which remains ephemeral and separate.
Art does not heal. It transforms aspects of life into an iconic and permanent form. It translates pain into something universal that transcends life in its immediacy.
We will continue talking about female names that left their mark on photography and about contemporary female photographers who are still to emerge. There are a lot of female photographers out there deserving of praise and we can only hope to cover as many of them as we can. Please follow this space to find out more.