The female form remains one of the most fundamental subjects of art and photography. But how do we look at it? Through what do we look at it?

Recently a show at International Center of Photography (ICP) in New York asked the question literally. Woman, on view at ICP between April 17 and April 23, showed female forms with a veil thrown on them, using  the cinemagraph, a new medium of photography.

The cinemagraph is a living image, a hybrid between still and video, invented and coined by the artists in 2011, in New York, as a way to conceptually capture a living, breathing moment in time, says the ICP website.

It is as if the subject comes to life.

The images in Woman are the work of Kevin Burg, a digital artist, and Jamie Beck, a photographer.

The cinemagraph was particularly appropriate as a medium as the series was also about a woman’s new identity coming to life.

Woman, which showed a number of women’s bodies shot beautifully under a gauze-like veil, giving an impression of painting, asks the viewer directly what is projected on to women’s bodies when he or she looks at them. How the body is looked at says more about the viewer than the subject. It is also about the social identity of the viewer. “The veil of what we project upon women’s bodies and their identities says more about our own predilections as participants in society than it does about who that woman truly is,” says the website.

The meaning that we project on to an image is ours. Beauty, and obscenity, both lie in the beholder's eye.

The series also questions “why we externalise so many ideals on to the form of a woman beyond just beauty”. The ideals are so many: social, moral, religious, and, in these times marinated in consumer culture, of things. We can hardly imagine the human form unrelated to other things, just as itself.

Woman was viewed during the day on monitors inside the ICP Museum and during evening hours, images were literally “projected” on to the windows of the ICP Museum, says ICP. In the evening, the images could be viewed from the sidewalk outside the Museum and were most visible after sunset.

So what do you see  when you look at these images?