Image Project Huang

Working Women

The leading figure of this image is a photomontage of four women: the movement conservative and anti-Equal-Rights-Amendment campaigner Phyllis Schafly, the pro-ERA activist and feminist Gloria Steinem, the Medusa, and the multitasking housewife on the cover of the first issue of Ms., a feminist-themed magazine co-founded by Steinem in 1972. I became interested in the history of pro- and anti-ERA movements after watching the miniseries Mrs. America (2020), in which Phyllis Schafly (aka \u201cthe sweetheart of the silent majority,\u201d played by Cate Blanchett) is one of the leading roles. Although I am not an expert in that history, I hope to put the aforementioned women together because I see that there is something similar deeply under their divergent appearances and life choices. Specifically, I hope to illustrate how Phyllis Schafly and her anti-feminist group did the same thing (working outside the domestic space and trying to gain agency in men\u2019s world, for example) as the pro-ERA group, whose ideas they opposed so aggressively. Hannah Hoch\u2019s photomontage is an effective technique to underscore this similarity between seemingly unrelated figures and images. Apart from suturing the women together, I also put the multitasking hands from the Ms. magazine cover on the top area of the image, which I think is relevant both today and back then, as they still seem to be the swords hanging over the working women\u2019s head. In the bottom of the image, I put copies of Ronald Reagan\u2019s suit and tie into the shape of a rugged road, not only because of the widely-circulated stories of Schafly\u2019s role in Reagan election, but also as a metaphor of the difficulties on the road towards women\u2019s liberation.

You Are What You Break

The work I have in mind while creating this image is Barbara Kruger\u2019s iconic \u201cYour Body is a Battleground\u201d poster for the Women\u2019s March in Washington in support of reproductive freedom. While my work focuses on another set of issues (of detention, regulation and freedom), I am intrigued by the power of Kruger\u2019s work to create protest and to speak out and share values. With the hope of generating similar power, I decide to work on and reappropriate Henri Cartier-Bresson\u2019s 1975 photo, \u201cSolitary confinement. Model prison of Leesburg, New Jersey.\u201d The information about the photo is scarce on the Internet, yet we know from the title that it was taken in the 1970s, a time when Foucault\u2019s Discipline and Punish was first published and when Magnum Photos, of which Bresson was one of the five founders, had established an eminent and prestigious position in photography. One thing that strikes me in this photo is the central role of the subjective agency of the prisoner, which, through the aggressive and camera-conscious gesture, seems to defy what Susan Sontag noticed as the preference for immediacy or spontaneity in journalist photos. Borrowing from Kruger, I reiterate this agency through adding texts, creating frames within frames and playing with the negative and positive side of the photo. The part of the photo inside the red rectangle is inverted from positive to negative, forming a contrast with the part outside the frame, where the arm and leg of the prisoner are trying to reach into. I also put the word \u201cobedience\u201d onto the four corners of the frame, except for the left-bottom side, where the word is kicked away. It is my hope to call attention to the issues of discipline, detention and freedom, and to generate power of resistance through creating this image.