What is the photographic gaze?

“The idea of a photographic ‘gaze’ relates to a specific way of looking, and being looked at through the camera, and implies a certain psychological relationship of power and control.
The camera lens is another demonstration of a powerful gaze, referred to as the photographic gaze, simulating the gaze of the naked eye. Indeed, the former could even be more powerful than the gaze of the naked eye due to photographic permanence. Janina Struk defines a photograph as: “a two-dimensional object, a fraction of a second framed and frozen in time” (4). Susan Sontag in On Photography notes that “photographs are a neat slice of time, not a flow” (17). It is the stillness of a photograph that gives it power and makes it more effective than television broadcasting or film.

Types of gazes

• the spectator’s gaze: the gaze of the viewer at an image of a person (or animal, or object) in the text; 
• the intra-diegetic gaze: a gaze of one depicted person at another (or at an animal or an object) within the world of the text (typically depicted in filmic and televisual media by a subjective ‘point-of-view shot’); 
• the direct [or extra-diegetic] address to the viewer: the gaze of a person (or quasi-human being) depicted in the text looking ‘out of the frame’ as if at the viewer, with associated gestures and postures (in some genres, direct address is studiously avoided); 
• the look of the camera – the way that the camera itself appears to look at the people (or animals or objects) depicted; less metaphorically, the gaze of the film-maker or photographer.

How it links to my artist references

The gaze links to both my artist references regarding the male gaze, In feminist theory, the male gaze is the act of depicting women and the world in the visual arts and in literature from a masculine, heterosexual perspective that presents and represents women as sexual objects for the pleasure of the heterosexual male viewer.

Although both my artists are female they capture photos of women and girls in a way which would be desirable to a male audience, they capture true beauty of the females and show them in an explicit way, which typically men want to see as they look desirable in many of the images and the models have these strong feminine features, which make them stand out.