Week 4: 2/14

The primitive has long been a subject in art. During the 19^th century many painters depicted the primitive through the means of the female nude. Delacroix’s painting Odalisque represents the female figure, exposed and available, sexualized for the consumption of the European gaze. This gaze of the male artist objectifies the female body as well as ‘the Other’ to fulfill the European fantasy.

Well’s ‘Case Study: Tourism, Fashion and ‘the Other,’’ explores how photography functions in the representation of the exotic or primitive. Wells explains how many photographers were commissioned to capture the colonized people. These photographs often translated into an “unequal relationship of power between the white photographers and the colonized subject.” Through this, the colonized person is no longer is an individual, but instead an object for the European to consume. Wells describes the way in which “French photographers constructed visions of exotcisim which suited their own colonial fantasies and those of the European consumers of thse images.” These photographs allow Europeans to  “perceive their own superiority” in which “Europe was defined as ‘the norm’ upon which all other cultures should be judged.” The representation of non-western cultures through art illustrates the way in which art and photography can construct or distort reality.