feminist theory in the selby.
Other themes run throughout the photos. Despite their differences, the women all seem to pose the same: either playful-adorable-sexy with hints of Lolita, or playful-adorable-sexy with hints of maturity. What’s striking is the amount of leg in each photo featuring women; rather than obvious sexuality, the naked-from-the-waist down has an air of implied sexuality. Maria Sturken and Lisa Cartwright point out in Practices of Looking that, “[n]o matter what social role an image plays, the creation of an image through a camera lens always involves some degree of subjective choice through selection, framing, and personalization.” (16) What choice is Mr. Selby making, then? The dichotomy between the poses of men and poses of women are all too clear when looking at the shots of couples; the woman is playful, happy, sexual while the man is shown with more power and assertion.
Even the usage of ‘women’ must be carefully considered; Peaches was a mere 19 at the time of the shooting. Isabelle McNally, another subject, is also still in her teens. Krysten Ritter stares coquettishly at the camera, with her legs tantalizingly stretched out in front of her. As Marshall McLuhan explains in “The Mechanical Bride,” “legs, like busts, are power points which [the modern girl] has been taught to tailor…She knows that ‘a long-legged gal can go places.’” This hyper-sexualization of female legs in the media is portrayed not just in these Selby photographs but is prevalent throughout media in general: another example is Beyoncé’s “Single Ladies” music video. The hip-shaking, leg-extending, stiletto-wielding women in this video, while singing about being “single ladies,” are doing exactly what McLuhan hypothesized: they’re wielding the power they know they have through their legs (and it doesn’t hurt that the formfitting top shows off their perfect bodies).
Their power is not relegated to their long legs; they wield a power through their gazes, too. Chase Cohl stares at the camera exactly the way Krysten Ritter just did; unblinkingly, almost smirking but not - one long-legged beauty is traded for another one. A myth (Barthes) is starting to be crafted; these legs and gazes are not just signifying beautiful women but sexuality. “Men look at women. Women watch themselves being looked at,” John Berger clarifies in Ways of Seeing. (47) Are these women watching themselves being looked at? Eerily, they are; these pictures are up for everyone to see. Who’s looking, and at what point did the focus move from these girl’s material objects to them? Sturken and Cartwright assert that, “looking involves relationships of power.” (10) The photographs are going up on the Internet, so people are going to be looking. The pictures seem almost exploitative. Lily, darling, just because your butt is almost fully covered, it doesn’t mean that these aren’t hypersexual photographs aren’t selling the idea of you - you, who is beautiful, young, wealthy.
These photographs are not traditional advertisements in that, on the surface, they are not selling anything. Nor is there any real purpose other than what was described before (showing personalites through spaces); they just exist as representations of Mr. Selby’s art. Todd Selby is, however, a professional and commercial photographer. The Selby is a pet project of his; yet there is a commercial tie-in. In response to the question, “[d]oes [The Selby] translate into assignments for Todd Selby?” in an interview on aphotoeditor.com, the answer was, “I have been getting a lot more calls from magazines, [and] tons of interest from advertisers…” So perhaps these shots of hypersexualized women serve as indirect advertisements for his own work. That is not the stated purpose, but it still is a useful one.
