Virtual femininity : a photographic exploration of the idealised body in digital self-imaging practices

In the current age of social media, visual representations of femininity are inextricably tied to digital technology and self-imaging practices. In this project, digital self-portrait photography becomes a means of investigating how the aesthetics of ideal femininity are conceptualised in the social media environment. The aesthetics of commercial photography have filtered into selfie practices, where idealising processes of digital photo manipulation and high production are becoming dominant and normalised. As a result, women and girls are pulled into a new matrix of femininity defined by technology, digital imaging, and structures of bodily surveillance.

The smartphone has enabled us to easily modify and beautify our appearance through technology, pushing the feminine ideal towards a simulated vision bordering on the uncanny. The digitally altered self-image encroaches on our lived reality, creating distorted perceptions of self-image. Image-based social media platforms mark a shift towards self-presentation of the female body. In the context of this apparent autonomy, my practice-led research investigates how the female body continues to be regulated and mediated by the influence of the smartphone, digital imaging, and an economy of social media images.

My research position is twofold. As a young woman, I am implicated in this system of engaging with and consuming social media images; yet, my studio investigation is concerned with deconstructing elements of this system. My experience with the feminine ideal is ambivalent, shifting between collusion and critique; my photographic exploration aims to reflect this push and pull. This project addresses three key questions:

• How can photographic artifice be employed to destabilise and subvert representations of ideal femininity?
• In what ways is the female body mediated in the self-fashioning practices of social media, and how has the feminine ideal evolved in the digital space?
• How can self-portraiture be utilised to probe the cusp between feminine beauty and the uncanny?

Jean Baudrillard’s theory of hyperreality informs my understanding of social media as an immersive environment that eclipses and shapes the real. My discussion draws on the work of Roland Barthes and Rosalind Krauss to argue for the relevance of photography’s connection to reality in the era of digital photographs. Karen de Perthuis’ concept of the synthetic ideal, a product of digital photo manipulation, is used to analyse the current landscape of self-imaging and beauty ideals. Additionally, my work is underpinned by Rosalind Gill’s writing on the internalisation of a male, cultural, or technological gaze in women’s self-imaging practices on social media platforms.

Key practitioners contextualising this project include Lucy McRae, Amalia Ulman, Orlan, Julie Rrap, and Cindy Sherman – each of whom uses their body as a medium within their practice. These artists explore the relationship between emerging technologies, media, and the body. Similarly, my studio investigation of self-portrait photography appropriates the technology, aesthetics, and practices I am critiquing, deploying them in a manner which aims to disrupt the feminine ideal. Through strategies such as photo manipulation, costuming, pose, doubling, dissolving the image, and lighting, I seek to push my images to the point where they tip over into the uncanny. The resulting work explores the anxieties that have risen due to the boundaries between our physical and virtual bodies becoming increasingly blurred.