Artwork by Felix D’eon

A joyous night, the dancers held each other tight,

The musicians played, and, the onlookers swayed

So the story is told, an atmosphere to behold

Amongst the group, a minestrone soup of pleasure and dance

The onlookers too, in a trance

Men and women, Men and men, and lesbians too,

They jointly moved, as if on cue

No one bothered, no one cared

Sexuality unimpaired

From the gloom, came a bang

In burst the police with a clang

They were rude, the Sargent shrewd

There should only be mixed gender couples the Court proclaimed

The deviants should be ashamed

You don’t need specs, it is not complex

There is only biological sex.

Back story.

El baile de los cuarenta y uno (The dance of the forty one) refers to a scandal at a private party in Mexico in 1901. Police raided the party and a number of arrests were made. (See https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dance_of_the_Forty-One).

I was struck by how similar the issues around gender and sexuality are to modern discourse.

“Biological Sex” was written in a 30 minute exercise in the Queer Write group. The image by Felix D’eon was the only guide.

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Beyond the canvas

Beyond the canvas. A poem beyond the torrent and torment of the Gods. Mortal desire, lust and love.

By Christina Osborne

Powerful strokes and lines

Majestic scenes from the mind

From gentle brooks to whirlpools, downpours and torrents

Angry Gods exercise powers beyond mortal man

Horses gallop, surge and recoil

Greed and manipulation

Thunderous scenes

Punishment mettled

Violence and unhappy endings

But within are gentler strokes and subtle meaning

Images of love

Mortal shivers, twined with lust

Desires beyond the canvas

Oh, Leonardo.

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Red red eyes

In a far away land, it seems like years ago. I used to wake up to the radiant glow of your body.

I’d lie, wake up, ever the morning person. I’d gently slip out of bed and you would pretend to be unaware of my presence.

I can still see you in the floral chair, the cat on your lap. A morning kiss. Like the sun on morning dew. A promise of things to come.

You would have a slow start, and then burst into life when it was time to leave. Boots laced, dog on leash, enthusiastically waiting.

Walking, walking, walking until our legs were sore and our feet blistered. Coffee, holding hands, and then off again. You in front, scowling at me as I stopped to take a photograph with my silver camera.

Back home. That warm and welcoming fragrance that hit as we entered. You made the old lady’s house beautiful.

I didn’t see you slipping away, spirit broken.

Reinvented, alone.

Retribution. Harm. Dignity. Mistrust. Price. Revenge.

Accusations and lies.

Red, red eyes.

You might also be interested in “The Lighthouse”. See https://chrissy.lgbt/2023/10/07/the-lighthouse/

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The second time Phil and I met was at the Northampton Museum and Art Gallery. He had offered to show me around the Punk exhibition when we had first met on the high street a week before.

He looked surprisingly tame today. He was sporting a five-day beard, and he smelt of soap. He was wearing a hoodie in place of the leather biker jacket that he was sporting when we had first met.

Phil was a real punk. He had formed So77, a band that had developed a moderate following across the UK. Forget the exhibition. I found myself talking to the real thing.

Even though it was still morning, the smell of beer lingered on his breath. He apologized. Then laughed. “Fuck it. It is Saturday after all”.

The waitress brought coffee to our table. Phil had ordered a double expresso, and his cup emitted a strong but pleasant aroma. He waited for it to cool, and then swallowed it in a single gulp.

We started talking about his musical career. One of So77’s highlights had been fronting for The Jam. The gig at Birmingham Town Hall had received a rapturous applause. Unusually, the sound engineer from The Jam had complimented them on their performance. And at the after-show party, Paul Weller had made a point of coming over to say how much he had enjoyed their set.

Phil explained that he wanted to revive the band. He talked about how the previous iteration of the band had broken up. He was close to tears. The bass player and drummer had tried to oust him from his own band. “I had been doing a lot of coke and alcohol back then”, he admitted.

He had taken this badly and their relationship moved past the point of no return when he pointed out that he had paused the band when the bass player needed time off when his wife had been diagnosed with cancer. The drummer, who was married and had four children was already in the firing line for repeatedly hitting on Phil’s partner.

This was the point where our conversation swerved wildly off course. We discovered that we had similar life experiences with failed relationships. Ironically, at various stages of our lives, we had lived quite close to each other, even though we had never met before. We mused over the negative serendipity, and shared horror stories of having relationships with our children brought to a premature end by angry wives who believed that children were an extension of themselves.

We left the quiet of the gallery and crossed the street. Phil liked the idea of being photographed in front of a mural depicting Queen Elizabeth and King Charles. There was a faint aroma of urine at the base.

The hoodie had gone and he was now sporting a yellow T-shirt proclaiming “We are the Sex Pistols”. His leather jacket had appeared from heaven knows where. He was wearing a pair of tartan Doc Marten boots, that he claimed to have bought in a factory sale for a mere 5 pounds in 1993. They were purchased from the White and Bishop shoe factory in Daventry that mysteriously burnt down. We were heartbroken, They built TESCO on the site. My late best friend lived in a house next to the factory.  He was offered double the market value of the house. Tesco won. They pulled up 200-year-old trees and ripped down Victorian houses. We were gobsmacked.

The boots were immaculate, and I wondered if they had spent their life in the box. They certainly had not seen much street action. Phil has all of the punk moves. He moves effortlessly from a display of anger to anarchy. But occasionally I can get him to drop the punk mask and the vulnerability of a man who has lived life shows through.

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“People have always been visual – our brains are wired for images. Writing was a hack, a detour. Pictorial languages are how we all started to communicate – we are coming full circle”, noted Instagram co-founder Kevin Systrom in a conversation with American venture capitalist Mary Meeker. We are living in the most visually rich periods in history. But how representative are the images we digest?

Several months ago, I was talking to British portrait photographer Emma Freeman. During our conversation, she passed comment that “photography is still very male-dominated”. A few days later, I was talking to Jane Fletcher-Scadden, a commercial photographer and film archivist in New Zealand. She used the same phrase to describe male dominance in the accepted history of photography. And during the following week, Finnish photographer Katri Lassila observed that “landscape photography is still very male-dominated”.

I found myself contemplating three important questions. Is there a gender imbalance in images in humankind’s most visually rich period? If so, how has this happened? And if this is the case, is it helpful to portray the world through images predominantly made by males? 

The history of photography is dominated by male photographers. If you are unsure about this, try a quick search on Google for “famous photographers”. My monitor is large enough to show fourteen photographers along the top of the screen. Names like Alfred Steiglitz, Man Ray, Walker Evans, and Robert Frank. Of the fourteen, only three are women. Annie Liebovitz, Dorothea Lange and Dianne Arbus. For every female photographer that Google believes is significant, the world’s most popular search algorithm can find four men.

This imbalance is often justified with a social/historical argument. The logic behind this assertion is that historically men had better opportunities than women, and as a consequence many of the best photographers in the past were male.

While this seems plausible, it may not be true. In the early 1900s, more than 50% of photographers were female. Studios were often situated below the living accommodation and the practicality of a business/job close to the home and family undoubtedly tipped the balance. But not every female photographer spent all their time in the studio.

The Nordic state of Finland proudly claims to have one of the most gender-neutral societies in the world. Twenty years ago Signe Brander was another unknown photographer of the past. This is despite creating a historical record of over 700 images of Helsinki, a series on the Finnish war and a collection of images of Finnish Manor houses that took twenty years to make. Yet by the beginning of this century, Signe Brander failed to feature in the Finnish photography curriculum.

Signe Brander makes an interesting case study. She was interested in painting but was encouraged to study photography instead. This was often recommended for young women as being more appropriate than “real, high art”. Women were discouraged and often banned from learning to paint nudes and human anatomy throughout 18^th and early 19^th Century Europe.

To the credit of Finnish academia, she has been reinserted into Finnish photography history. But this is not an isolated case. The work of another 70 Finnish women has been identified. These women weren’t just shooting in the studio below their apartment. They were making documentary work across Europe and up into Siberia.

On a commercial level, by the turn of the 20th century, Kodak was actively promoting photography to the “New Woman” through its “Kodak Girl” campaign. This was a marketing campaign directed at a generation of women seeking enfranchisement, economic and sexual autonomy. It seems improbable that the women who purchased and used cameras failed to produce anything noteworthy.

If one accepts that there are “lost” female photographers, then the next question must surely be why? And one of the uncomfortable possibilities is that the curriculum of noteworthy photographers we base our academic syllabus on was created by men, for men.

Can we measure the scale of the imbalance? There is a surprising amount of data. For example, an annually published study authored by Kate McMillan for the Freeland Foundation (based in London) considers gender equality in the arts (not only photography). In 2019 only 35% of artists represented by commercial galleries in London were women. At the top end of the market of the 112 artists whose work was sold in Christie’s evening sales in 2019, only 14 were women.

The positive trend is that the gender split of Gallery Directors in London is nearing gender parity. However, the split in major institutions and galleries outside London still has a heavy male bias. (70M:30F). A larger sample shows the rate of improvement to be a meagre 1% per annum.

Do you look to a newspaper for balanced reporting? It turns out that there is a significant gender imbalance in editorial photography too. Photojournalist Alex Washburn asked a photo editor why she didn’t hire more female photographers at a photo festival in France in 2016. “Well, I’d hire more women if I knew where to find them”, came the reply. Alex started womenphotograph.com, a site that includes statistics on photographs taken by women in the press. These statistics for 2020 demonstrate that we have a long way to go. The percentage of lead images featured in major daily newspapers made by women were; The San Francisco Chronicle setting the bar at 43%, The New York Times 29%, Wall Street Journal 11%, Le Monde 10%, and The Guardian 8%.

I talked to photographer/filmmaker Jillian Edelstein. She observes that the “outstanding picture editors are not afraid to take risks. They make assignments based on merit”. She remembers Aidan Sullivan from “The Sunday Times” calling shortly after the birth of her second child with an assignment to shoot John Malkovich. She had been feeling vulnerable and insecure about her position at work, and this was a massive affirmation of her abilities. “I do not doubt that he firmly believed in selecting the right person for the assignment”.

Forbes published an article with research showing that 75% of consumer purchases are driven by women. American artist and photographer Jill Greenberg comments “A lot of times the photographer has the least amount of power to make decisions. But, at the same time, the dynamic of the shoot is always captured in the photograph and even more so in an editorial context when we have much more impact and control on the way things look. Power, sexuality, etc., everything is there. So, if it’s all men making these images that are marketed primarily to women, there’s something wrong”.

Wendy Carrig is a British advertising and editorial photographer. She was instrumental in restarting “f22”, a group within AOP aimed at creating awareness around gender imbalance. She observes that “attitudes are changing within the industry. My male colleagues want a world where their daughters have equal opportunities”.

Julia Peck is the academic lead in photography at a UK university. The percentage of female students has steadily risen to 75%, and this is typical across Europe. She has witnessed a negative reaction from female students to the overwhelmingly male photographer-based curriculum. Julia observes that “many women make work that is looser than that of men.  In part this is a reaction to the male dominance of technology”.

“If we accept that we need more diversity in the academic curriculum, then we have to question whether the work of primarily male photographers is relevant. Unless we see more diversity in arts education (in the broadest sense of the word), we will perpetuate a distorted perspective”.

Del Barrett, a researcher and academic reflects, “Changing the curriculum is a bit like changing direction in the Queen Mary”.

Del founded the charity “Hundred Heroines” to promote women in the visual arts. She notes that while there is an issue with gender balance in photography, the imbalance in “the film industry is even more pitiful”. There are now 175 “Heroines”. Women and non-binary photographers and filmmakers apply or are nominated and are selected on merit and for making inspirational work.

Some of the photographers and educators I spoke to expressed a concern that contributing to this article might have a negative impact on their careers and were careful about how they expressed their views.

Ecuadorian university lecturer and artist Paola Paredes was very forthright. “Photography is male-dominated. In Ecuador, 90% of project winners are white male. This means that we don’t get a rich diversity of experiences in visual stories. There is one type of lens/gaze”.

Paola took up a teaching position at a university after returning to Ecuador from London with an MA in Photography. She has a very strong recollection of the reaction of 5 men in the photography department to a new woman lecturer. “They felt threatened by me. I was super discriminated against”. Despite bringing a new outlook on photography she was ignored and marginalised. Not surprisingly she has since moved to another university.

It is worth noting that Paola’s work has been exhibited across the Americas and Europe. The series “Until You Change” caused the Ecuadorian Government to outlaw gay correction facilities.

Celia Jackson lectures photography and is an advocate for gender balance in image-making. The last line of an article commissioned by “The Conversation” sums up the frustration of many women in the industry. “These are not big asks. It would be quite easy to make the industry as well as photographic output more gender-equal – we just need to be more proactive about it”.

Ukrainian American artist and filmmaker Anna Kipervaser sees the issue as less two dimensional. “To make any progress at all, we need to achieve balance across race and ethnicity, not only gender.”

Jillian Edelstein describes a world where the last two years has seen a significant change in the way that picture editors/photo directors/visual directors are assigning work, particularly in response to awareness around BAME (Black, Asian and minority ethnic). Picture editors are increasingly having to demonstrate that they have achieved equality and balance. Of course, commercial pressures such as the number of followers a photographer has on social media may also play a part. 

The final word goes to British artist Clare Strand, who describes how gender is unimportant to her Zoomer (Generation Z) daughters aged 7 and 11. “My daughters are surrounded by an open mix of sexuality and gender at their school and this is their ‘normal’. They are often confused as to why this is even considered an issue.

They are interested in what kind of people their contemporaries are, Are they kind? Are they happy?…..whether you choose to be a girl or a boy or neither is not a consideration. I look forward to the Zoomers taking charge. This mindset can only help bring about a less discriminatory and more inclusive society”.

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The lighthouse thought of herself as being eighty feet high. In fact, she was seventy-nine and a half feet but liked to image herself as taller. She was almost 150 years old and was built of brick and had thick walls that had withstood violent storms. She lived on a small island about ¼ of a mile off the coast. She didn’t know where, but on a clear day, she could see the coastline.

She loved to look out across the seascape. There was a different vista in every direction, and even though she was old and only had one huge eye, her eyesight was as sharp as the day that she was born. She loved the fact that the weather changed. Some days were calm, and the sky was blue. On other days, the cloud came down to meet her, and the wind whistled past. Even though she could not travel, sometimes she did dream of distant lands.

These days she was mostly alone. They had automated her almost forty years ago. Technicians monitored her from the shore and visited for the day several times a year. But, it hadn’t always been this way. She missed the days when a keeper stayed with her all the time.

She thought about Peter whenever loneliness set in. He was a quiet, gentle man. On pleasant days he used to sit outside amongst the overgrowth and watch the birds. Sometimes he would photograph them. He was always meticulous about caring for her, and when he visited she was always cleaned with love.

Sebastian on the other hand was rough. He only paid attention to her when something went wrong. He would walk around the little island, and because he never took his boots off, there was always mud up her steps and across her floors whenever he stayed. Even though he believed that he tidied up before he left, she sensed that the other keepers dreaded coming on a tour after Peter.

However, Faye had been her favourite. Faye used to don rubber gloves and clean and polish her for the first few days. Faye always made sure that she was looked after. The parts that needed oil or grease were always attended to. And Faye took great pleasure in cleaning her glasswork, even during balmy weather.

She smiled to herself when she thought of Faye standing on the spit in the sunshine. The last full day that Faye had been with her, the clouds broke and she remembered Faye’s yellow dress highlighted by a ray of sunshine.

The day that Faye left was different. She had felt Faye’s hand run down the balustrade one last time. Faye had gone to the accommodation area and had changed back into her male clothes for the trip back to the shore. She could sense Faye’s unhappiness.

This time a group of men disembarked the lighter. They had boxes of tools and equipment. They had come to modernise the Lighthouse. They ripped some of the parts that she had been born with out and replaced them with new, cheaper, electronic parts that meant that she no longer required a keeper. It took almost two weeks, and when they left her insides were strewn with beer bottles and detritus. She had been without love since then.

A story written during a thirty minute online session with “Writing Together in 2023”.

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