Visions of Sex Presentation: The Covered Body- Research

'Correct Distance'- Mitra Tabrizian.

Correct Distance is a book of photographs by Iranian Artist (living in London) Mitra Tabrizian- but it is also considered a book about photographs and the politics of representation. Mitra Tabrizian develops ideas theoretically informed by Marxism, structuralism and pyschoanalysis ( those explored by Laura Mulvey on Film and Griselda Pollock on Painting) from the perspective of sexual and cultural difference within the medium of photography.

' Correct Distance offers a map of the ways in which the debate on sexual difference and photgraphic practice developed during the eighties. It is through this broader feminist porject, with its emphasis on the sexual politics of representation and the questions os desire and pleasure, that the work should be read' (Feminist Review, Roberta McGrath)

Notes from 'Veils, Masks and Mirrors, Griselda Pollock, Correct Distance (Cornerhouse 1990):

'I was struck by the unexpected force of a single figure, a veiled woman, covered from head to foot by her dark robe from which only a diamond shaped segment of her face escaped. She looks directly at us, framed off centre within the architectural geometry of a public building....This is neither a posed portrait of a politician, or the casual news shot of a political figure in her place of work - but a carefuly achieved effect in which the woman in present and concealed, protected from our gaze and looking straight at us. Does the veil disembody her and resit the fetishism typical of western representation of the female body, which Islam claims to honour by veiling? Or does it entice and confirm the mystery of what is hidden?'

'The enveloped figure is also a version of the masquerade of femininity- bearing a striking visual resemblance to Mrs Gorji. This time Mildred Pierce is a fictional character caught in that public world with a version of the veil- a feminine dress which conceals the seductive body the daughter flaunts before us but which heightens its threat. Women covered or uncovered are still trapped in the contradictions of a law which confines them because the culture of men sees dangers all over their bodies if ever they escape confinement' ( Riviere, quoted by Griselda Pollock in Veils, Masks and Mirrors)

'masculinity is identified with the pleasure of active looking and possession in fantasy by means of that gaze while femininity has become synonymous with exhibitionism- being looked at and being styled to attract and recieve the gaze. The look- or who looks- has thus become a means to discuss a formation of power, by means of the way looking and its regulation translates into visual codes both a social and a psychic organisation of sexual difference.'

'Women looking signifies danger and the castrating power of the femme fatale in horror films and film noir. Mitra Tabrizian seems to create the look as both aggressive, challenging and resistant.'

The complex layering of meaning, posititioning of characters and multidirectional nature of the gaze within Mitra Tabrizian's work plays a crucial part in questioning the masquerade in which our identities and sexualities and constructed and held.

'The game is not to strip away the veil and expose the truth- the lie of documentary photography and bourgeois realism. It is to know what masks we wear, to define the texts we perform and to accept the necessity for critical knowledge as the condition for new pleasures, a 'new langauge of desire.'