Power & Hierarchy: Looking up!
by: Marta Poncelas , June 25, 2022
by: Marta Poncelas , June 25, 2022
When walking in the City of London, you feel impelled to look up—up towards the top of the towering buildings. It’s almost as if you are being forced to perform an act of obeisance to something. Obeisance to what? To Power & Hierarchy and, in particular, to patriarchal power.
State buildings serve the governmental and legislative purposes of society and are often designed to convey a sense of grandeur, and to express power. The Bank of England is a good example, and it also includes statuary, reminding the public of military success and imperial power.
Commercial buildings are often designed to give a sense of permanence, strength, and trustworthiness. Like state buildings, they convey a message of Power & Hierarchy, with the locale of the buildings forcing people to look up as though in an act of obeisance. Some of the buildings also have secret (or not so secret!) messages of dominance and control, particularly of a sexual nature.
The full series of images can be viewed at martaponcelas.com
WHO SUPPORTS US
The team of MAI supporters and contributors is always expanding. We’re honoured to have a specialist collective of editors, whose enthusiasm & talent gave birth to MAI.
However, to turn our MAI dream into reality, we also relied on assistance from high-quality experts in web design, development and photography. Here we’d like to acknowledge their hard work and commitment to the feminist cause. Our feminist ‘thank you’ goes to:
Dots+Circles – a digital agency determined to make a difference, who’ve designed and built our MAI website. Their continuous support became a digital catalyst to our idealistic project.
Guy Martin – an award-winning and widely published British photographer who’s kindly agreed to share his images with our readers
Chandler Jernigan – a talented young American photographer whose portraits hugely enriched the visuals of MAI website
Matt Gillespie – a gifted professional British photographer who with no hesitation gave us permission to use some of his work
Julia Carbonell – an emerging Spanish photographer whose sharp outlook at contemporary women grasped our feminist attention
Ana Pedreira – a self-taught Portuguese photographer whose imagery from women protests beams with feminist aura
And other photographers whose images have been reproduced here: Cezanne Ali, Les Anderson, Mike Wilson, Annie Spratt, Cristian Newman, Peter Hershey