Kate Peters is a British photographer from the Coventry, England and was born in 1980. She completed her studies at Falmouth College of Arts in Cornwall where she studied Photography. After graduating she spent 4 years assisting Nadav Kandar, a photographer who I am also particularly interested in researching for this project.
I am strongly intrigued by Kate Peters project ‘Cam Girls’ where she photographs women who work for themselves by creating online content which usually involves a sexual nature. Reading Jenna Garnett’s articles - Portraits of Sex Cam Girls, Captured Through Skype (NSFW) based on this subject and how Peters went about completing this project has really fascinated me, as stated in the article,' ‘She collaborates with these women to make art at a distance, offering a contemporary picture of a long-taboo subject.’ (Garrett, J, 2015) The images that have been created are very beautiful which some may think is quite contrasted to the subject itself. The photographs themselves ‘mimicked 19th-century western art nudes’ (Garrett, J., 2015) which, in my opinion, is really beautifully illustrated. The majority of female nude art was created for the male gaze especially in this period, but it is difficult to know if Peters was using these sorts of poses to portray this idea.
"One woman said she would pop into the kitchen to get some yogurt drink and he'd [her partner] think she was just thirsty and she would be getting something to pour on her breasts," says Peters. "At this point her partner was unaware of her job. She'd go back into her work room and be in character again, fulfilling the fantasies of a man on the other side of the world." (Garret, J, 2015)
Now this is what surprised me the most when reading this article. The fact that some of these women have partners when doing and they are keeping it secret from them. Personally, I would constantly be living in fear as who knows what is being recorded, screenshotted, hacked or anything, they are able to just switch personalities when on camera and not which is fair enough but in my opinion, once something has been put out there, it will always be out there, which makes me wonder if these women even worry about this.
To me, there is nothing sexual about this image, I see it as a very beautiful and natural pose of a beautiful lady, but I suppose we see sexual things as a taboo subject that everyone avoids as much as possible even though it is a completely natural thing.
I found this project extremely interesting in a number of aspects, but mostly the method of the photo taken, Peters took screenshots of the women through Skype and then rephotographed them on a large format camera which explains why the images are very pixilated which I find to be very aesthetic and is the look I am going for in my camera images.