naked lady : a dot red

A dot red, a series of hand-pulled photogravures, explores new perspectives on traditional genres and images found in landscape and portrait photography. By combining historical photographic techniques with more contemporary strategies, these works shift the focus of attention, and enable a reconsideration of its classical subjects.

naked lady : a dot red

Blackwood’s works employs both historic and modern photographic techniques to critique and give a contemporary and feminist voice to her photography. Exploring the idea of “the figure” with a red dot, backgrounded by historical landscape photographs, tradition and contemporary theory mingle, merge and clash. These traditional landscapes - historically photographed by men - act as a metaphor for a male view, and through this the feminine metaphor of the "red dot” emerges and creates a visual enigma which deliberately defies this tradition. Often and traditionally portrayed as nudes, the female body in photographs stands in stark contrast to the portrayal of men - often the ones taking the portraits - famous male photographers such as Weston, Stieglitz, Man Ray, etc, who commonly employed “the male gaze” approach. A final, distressing statement made in the last photo of the series, the red dot itself, with an anonymous female figure, divided.

-W. Tanner Young, Filter Photo