Female vs Feminist, a lesson from Petra Collins.

by Rochelle Oh

Being part of various minority groups (queer, of colour, a woman), but privileged in so many ways (cis-gendered, able, living in Melbourne, etc.), means empowerment and education has become a core part of my practice, my goals, and my career path, before it’s fully taken form. I want to use my work to bring pressing issues and ignored minority groups to life, however this has to be approached carefully. It’s not enough to just be female, or queer, or of colour to make ‘progressive’ work.

One fantastically female artist I look up to is Petra Collins. Her dreamy, brightly coloured, filmic campaigns has greatly impacted my photographic style. Not to mention her insane career path- at the current age of only 26, Collins is an internationally renowned artist, photographer, art director and model. When coming into prominence, it was her photo series titled The Teenage Gaze that circulated magazine and blog headlines, coupled with words pertaining to “UP AND COMING FEMALE PHOTOGRAPHER” or “FINALLY, A FEMALE GAZE”. For being female, Collins’ work was speaking on behalf of a whole gender, and her work was therefore definitely feminist, right?

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According to Collin’s website, The Teenage Gaze is comprised of “intimate portraits shot from 2010-2015 of teenage life” [1].  The works in this series mostly presents teen girls in stereotypical dress, engaging in the gendered act of grooming [2]. It enters the female dominion of the bathroom and does not challenge any cis-gender expectations [3] that are set in that space: for girls to be pretty, for girls to be born with certain biology, for girls to be waiting, and waiting, but always pretty, because they’re waiting for a man. Collins’ early work, albeit probably unintentionally, has participated in the reduction and commodification of the female experience, just as we’ve seen in the yoga industry [4]. The patriarchally pleasing female has been abstracted from the feminist, just as the slim white privilege body has been pushed to the front of the ancient Indian practice [5]. In The Teenage Gaze, Collins takes an already idealised a version of life, one that repeats patriarchal and white-dominant imagery, romanticises it with a refined colour palette and a 35mm film camera and turns it into an item of luxury. It’s the idea that you can use your money to surround yourself with pretty things and look just as hopeless as they do in it.

Taking note of this, I have made it my mission to disrupt the gender claim on spaces and portray a more thorough understanding of youthful exploration. The photos below are from a recent photo essay for Esperanto Magazine called My Clothes Aren’t Telling You Who I Want to Fuck. I’ve borrowed Collins’ dreamy style, overlapping bodies and editorial tone, but used it to invade the white cis-female-dominated fashion sphere with queer, non-binary and coloured bodies with the aim to challenge heteronormative and homophobic codes of dress. When approaching this shoot, everything was deliberate: I chose five models instead of four to avoid binary associations (e.g. “those are two boys, so those two must be girls”), I demanded queer representation (the only straight person in the shoot is my boyfriend, who as a straight cis-male is rarely represented participating in the female act of grooming), and although I directed the models to sometimes lie passively, their eyes are armed with power, not hopelessness.

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Collins’ work, whether in a good way or bad, highlights the importance of nuanced representation in photography, whether artistic, editorial or commercial. The Teenage Gaze is selectively observative, rather than empowering, and neglects so many already forgotten narratives of teenagehood [6] (e.g. trans experiences, non-white experiences, Muslim experiences, girls doing anything other than getting dressed and undressed…). Four years since The Teenage Gaze and Collins has since reworked images from the series into a book titled Babe, where the images are sandwiched between works from artists of all colours and non-cis-male gender identities, presenting a much more thorough representation of femininity. Bringing her fine arts background to many a high fashion campaign and magazine cover, Collins has shown big names that there is a desire for her unique female eye (and gives me hope that I won’t have to make helvetica posters my whole career). One day, I hope to have the platform and prominence to make space for authentic minority voices as Collins has since done. But for now, I’ll use these lessons on representation and gender commodification for student magazines, and watch from afar as she does it for Gucci.

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1. Petra Collins, “The Teenage Gaze,” accessed 1 April 2019, http://www.petracollins.com/the-teenage-gaze/

2. Kirkham, Pat and Attfield, Judy, “Introduction” The Gendered Object Manchester University Press, (1996): 1-11, accessed 1 April 2019, https://lms.monash.edu/pluginfile.php/8323631/mod_resource/content/1/wk%208%20Kirkham%20and%20Attfield%20Gendered%20object.pdf

3. Ibid.

4. Juliana Luna Mora, “The yoga industry: a conscious luxury experience in the transformation economy,” (PhD thesis, Monash University, n.d.), 3-5.

5. Ibid.

6. Jane Argodale, “Soft power: Petra Collins and the problem with the female gaze,” The College Hill Independent, accessed 1 April 2019,https://www.theindy.org/1442