AN event being held to celebrate International Women’s Day will use the experiences of an award-winning photographer to spark conversation about how we can create a more equal world.
All are invited to take part in the discussion at artist hub the Arianas Collective in Edinburgh on Thursday – and the ticket price includes wine, cheese and music by singer-songwriter Annie Booth.
The event to mark this year’s IWD theme of how gender balance is better for both people and the planet, capital-based photographer Jannica Honey will present her thoughts and experiences following a year when images from her recent When The Blackbird Sings project were regularly banned from social media.
Honey will explore how male and female bodies appear to be treated differently on social media, and how her naturalistic images of ordinary women’s bodies were taken down while images showing “plucked, trimmed and underfed” women are given what she believes to be increasing amounts of space.
Honey, who studied anthropology at university in Sweden before moving to Scotland around 20 years ago, said she noticed a change happening in the way community guidelines were implemented around the time she began When The Blackbird Sings, a series of delicate, ethereal portraits depicting women at twilight.
“Blackbird was about nature and women’s bodies, the cycles of the moon and of women,” says Honey. “These were authentic bodies, they showed ageing, hair, fat, stretch marks, but they were against community guidelines.”
Images of overweight women, says Honey, were the fastest to come down. Even when the Daily Record shared an online feature of the photographer’s exhibition at Arusha Gallery, Honey found she couldn’t “boost” the article on social media. Her portraits of lap dancers from 2011 were left untouched, she says.
Images which depict young women in poses more associated with pornography, meanwhile, are prevalent on social media – as long as certain areas are covered up.
“The female nipple is strictly forbidden,” says Honey, who has conducted experiments by posting images mixing up male and female nipples to see what gets taken down. This different treatment of the female body – especially of what she describes as the “authentic”, lived-in body, intersects with issues around power between men and women, and the beauty industry’s dependence on idealised images.
“This isn’t about what’s right and wrong,” she says. “It’s more about talking about this in a bigger group, involving both women and men. It’s about creating a discussion and noticing these things, maybe with clearer eyes. Because it’s all around us, because we’re so immersed in it,
it becomes more difficult to see.”
International Women’s Day is also marked at the nearby Arusha Gallery, which held the first showing of When The Blackbird Sings last year. This year they present new work by Chantal Powell, Kirsty Whiten and Kate Walters, artists interested in nature and the body, dreams, the subconscious and “the intersection of art and shamanism”.
March 7, The Arienas Collective, Edinburgh, 6.30pm, £13. Tickets: bit.ly/IWDArienas
www.jannicahoney.com
Kate Walters, Chantal Powell and Kirsty Whiten: Until March 17, Arusha Gallery, Edinburgh, Mon to Sat 10am to 5pm, Sun 1pm to 5pm, free.
Tel: 0131 557 1412.
www.arushagallery.com
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