BootyCam and Hype Williams

To identify Williams from a feminist perspective as the man who bent and bulged “booty-lens” into the camera work of some of the most popular hip hop videos around to grossly exploit women as sexual objects, would be a one sided rant about sexual politics in entertainment. It is easy to forget that Williams has done videos for many female hip hop artists and considers “booty-lens” as merely an imitated convention, often overworked as spectacle over concept. Bending the lens and shooting from particular angles created the over pronounced visual emphasis on curvaceous areas of the female form (breasts and buttocks). Often spliced in-between shots of the ‘crew’ Williams claims that booty shots were “filler-inners and not the basis for (his) art”. He goes on to criticize what is then considered `high art’ such as ‘the’ Venus , displaying her curves in an image revered past its sexual connotations. In an interview with designer Anna Sui, Williams describes the way in which he shot female rap artists from low angles. “ I like to see people exaggerated… I feel like women stand so tall nowadays in the world, and I like to see that mightiness in the camera, like when it looks like they're just towering over everybody”. His videos include that of Missy Eliot, Aliaya and No Doubt. It seems notions of Williams displaying powerful female figures has been conveniently forgotten by feminist critics such as Joan Morgan When Chickenheads Come Home to Roost: My Life as a Hip-hop Feminist 1999 who comments that the passive role portrayed by women in Williams “booty-call showcase” encourages objectivism over art towards notions of the feminine. Regardless, isn’t it plausible to say that art sometimes harms weather socially or politically, yet the sanitizing of art harms even more in its limitations to expressing musical subculture?