Photography as Protest: Anoli Perera’s I Let My Hair Loose

“In their traditional exhibitionist role women are simultaneously looked at and displayed, with their appearance coded for strong visual and erotic impact so that they can be said to connote to-be-looked-at-ness,” writes film theorist Laura Mulvey in her pioneering essay Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema (1975). She is referring to the male gaze in cinema, where the woman is the “image” and the man is the “bearer of the look.” The gendered politics of spectatorship extends far beyond cinema, however, and one is reminded of it in Sri Lankan contemporary artist Anoli Perera’s subversive photo-performance I Let My Hair Loose: Protest Series (2010), a set of black-and-white photographs of women staged in the stiff aesthetic of twentieth-century portraiture.

In her note on the series, Perera writes:

“This series of work was inspired by the memories of me gazing at the stone faced women in the old photographs that hung in my grandmother’s house as a child… The work uses female hair as a means to arrest the male gaze which objectifies the female sitter. By covering the face, it obstructs the completion of the viewers’ voyeuristic enjoyment of looking at their female sitter.”

Perera seems to offer this series as a form of protest against the male gaze. As a woman taking photographs of women and choosing to hide her subjects’ faces with their hair—despite the literal photo-taker being a man—she is stripping the male gaze of its power and opening up the idea of a female gaze. What happens when the woman takes control of the camera? How can image-making truly disengage from the gendered weight of its historical lineage? I Let My Hair Loose does not pretend to hold definitive answers to these questions. Instead, it acts simply as a provocation, a means by which to revisit and question what we know of photographic impulse.

All images courtesy of Anoli Perera.

Click on the image to view the album