Independent project

For my independent project, i focused on the brief “division,” as i looked at this in relation to gendered colour.

For some inspiration, I turned to the work of David Levinthal. Levinthal takes photographs of small toys to create a scene, ranging from X rated dolls to toy soldiers. This particular contrast caught my eye as it was a very girls/ boys divided set of projects. The projects that particularly interested me were the artworks “Pin-Ups” (2015) and “History” (2010-2015). These interested me as they housed vividly different images, the main difference being the gender of the models, therefore changing the entire subject of the images. To elaborate, within the ‘Pin-Ups’ artwork, the subjects are pin up girls, therefore they’re very feminine women put in moderately provocative situations. The ‘Soldiers’ piece heavily features men in fights which portrays a masculine stereotype.  The project i am working on is about gendered products, which this relates to. i enjoy this work as it has a very small focal point, and the rest of the image is blurred. the effect this gives kind of annoys me because i want it all to be in focus, however it looks good at the same time.

For this, i photographed different objects that could be found in a toy shop, then made them into black & white images to drain them of any colour that would make them appealing to a certain gender, below i have analysed that for the most part, it is the entire product that is the problem in suggesting a boys/girls divide.

I started off by photographing items on their own, such as the toy soldiers above. originally green, the black and white still shows how dark the boys part of the toy section can be, emphasising the divide between dull coloured boys toys and offensively pink girls toys.

This image is of a girls ring collection, surrounded by a pink crown. The impact of this is that girls stereotypically want jewels, and looking deeper into it it could suggest that girls are going to get married off one day.

Next, I took photographs of the above two items together, to collide worlds between boys toys and girls toys in a way, and to show the divide between the light and dark between the girl’s and boys toys. we can see that the ring holder is very light compared to the army men, which shows that the pink in the girls toy is somewhat more delicate than the dark green of the soldiers.

For this, i placed the rings on the soldiers, which added a level of femininity to the overall masculine portrayal of the objects. The toy soldiers being small enough to fit the rings onto is interesting in its own way, as it shows that two things, at the same price and the same size can be made to appeal to boys or to girls. These products both came in a container of sorts, however the rings were in a pack of 6 and the soldiers were in a bucket of 100, which, at the same price, shows that girls are paying more for less.

For this image, i have placed together a product sold in a shop which is targeted at boys next to a product that is targeted at girls. As you can see, the boys one has words like “POW” and “BOOM” on the packaging, whereas the girls one has “CRAZY & COOL” written on it. Based off this alone, we can visualise a stereotypical sexist nature of the manufacturer. This suggests a world in which girls are expected to be ‘crazy’ and ‘cool’ whereas boys, well, they can be batman.

These two are lip products for both men and women, one has cherries on and the other has Charlie Brown. this, again, is an obvious divide in design, which gives a sense of a divide between gender.

These figures are characters from (my favourite film, personally) Moana. The disney film features a controversial strong female lead, as Moana is not a princess but a chief’s daughter and master way finder, as she sails across the sea to find Maui, who is a demigod, to get him to help her restore order to the world. The characters are controversial as Moana is the stronger of the two, though you’d expect it to be maui, however looking at the action figures of the two without having seen the film, you’d expect otherwise. Maui looks as though he is stronger due to the tattoos and the way he is built, and Moana is smaller and less muscular. These toys would be played with by both boys and girls, as the Maui doll would appeal to boys and the Moana toy would appeal to girls, however the breaking of stereotypes would suggest the boys could want to play with the stronger lead, which would be Moana.

To conclude, i believe throughout my project i have identified that despite their best efforts, manufacturers can’t seem to put to bed the idea that there is a divide between products identified as boys toys or girls toys, sometimes even despite colour.

To put my findings into better words, here is a Russell Howard skit about girls’ toys being so patronising. He talks about clothing tailored to boys being about becoming superheroes and girls clothes being about becoming princesses. This show puts out the question, “why are girls’ toys so patronising?” bringing to light the real situation that girls’ toys and clothing are lowering women’s self esteem. Overall, I believe that manufacturers should stop drowning female consumers in a sea of pink, and make more gender neutral toys and clothing for children, so they aren’t having their self esteem lowered.