Rachel Jackson


TITLE:DESCRIPTION:YEAR:
Women are Beautiful by Garry Winogrand 
by Rachel Jackson


Series of framed inkjet prints
14 x 18”

2025
Women are Beautiful by Garry Winogrand by Rachel Jackson, 2025, explores the implications of artistic persona, especially as they pertain to expectations of female artists. Drawing literally upon past encouragement to include “more of myself” within my work, I recreated a facsimile of Garry Winogrand’s controversial 1975 monograph, Women are Beautiful, replacing the likeness of every female subject with my own. 


WOMEN ARE BEAUTIFUL BY GARRY WINOGRAND BY RACHEL JACKSON, 2025
EXCERPT FROM “SITE, LEGIBILITY, DISTRIBUTION”
Master’s Thesis Written by Rachel Jackson ON “WOMEN ARE BEAUTIFUL BY GARRY WINOGRAND BY RACHEL JACKSON”

Women are Beautiful by Garry Winogrand by Rachel Jackson was an attempt to mock the notion of where one might “be” in the work through excessive performance, propelling the romanticization of the self to a garish end. Though visually similar to Cindy Sherman’s Untitled Film Stills, the work extends beyond Pictures Generation strategies to a situationally-responsive gesture. In this body of work I aspired not to critique Winogrand for his capture of female subjects, but to seek out a more nuanced inhabitation of Women are Beautiful as a site of engagement–a confluence between the past and present in which I could temporally represent myself.

Though this question of “where are you in the work,” is not explicitly gendered, and can be extended more broadly to the issues of legibility that continue to plague contemporary art, it remains highly pertinent. If visual art’s primary goal is to respond to circumstance, or the conditions of the present, is it not reductive to fixate solely on its source of authorhood?