The Space a Body Occupies: Marianne Wex’s Striking Gendered Photos | The Funambulist
▻http://thefunambulist.net/2014/01/30/topie-impitoyable-the-space-a-body-occupies-marianne-wexs-striking-g
the visual power unfolded by German artist Marianne Wex‘s 1979 book, “Let’s Take Back our Space”: ‘Female’ and ‘Male’ Body Language as a Result of Patriarchal Structures, speaks for itself. I also recommend reading Andi Zeisler’s 2012 article for Bitch Magazine about Wex’s work. In the late 1970s, Wex took more than 6,000 photographs of bodies in the street and established an inventory based on the context in which the photographs have been taken and dividing men from women on each side of a virtual line that cuts the totality of the book into two parts. The contrast between genders is graphically striking between the comfortable positions of the male body that clearly attempts to occupy as much space as it is physically possible, while female bodies, on the contrary, — particularly in the presence of male counterparts as Wex points out — adopt positions that minimizes their occupation.
