"Even though I cannot be sorry that certain dead visionary women have attained in death the adoration they deserved in life — I’ve already mentioned Sylvia Plath, or Anne Frank or Virginia Woolf (Marilyn Monroe? Amy Winehouse?) — there is also something creepily avuncular and overheated about the culture industry “cumming” all over what it either never honestly bothered to nourish or insisted on taking only exactly the way it wanted to. Female commentators, including the brilliant ones, are often beset by the problem of (over)identification when they write about such figures, while male commentators cannot seem to give praise or produce readings, however just, without betraying a kind of respectful arousal (or aroused respect?) rendering themselves the somewhat abashedly horny liberal uncles of the world, free to jizz into history on the figure of the actual woman whose intention it was decidedly not, via her photographs, to merely physically seduce them."
—
Ariana Reines, “An Hourglass Figure: On Photographer Francesca Woodman” (April 4th, 2013)
I’ve read this twice in twenty-four hours. I cannot shake this.
"Androgyny is lazy journalist shorthand for the situation that arises when onlookers cannot tell whether the person they see is a man or a woman. It maintains the gender binary, but implies that sometimes it is a guessing game. These models, with their demolition of gender binary, are not androgynous. They are queer."
— Alison Bancroft, in “How Fashion is Queer” at The Qouch (March 14, 2013)
Four Women Asleep by Roland Penrose, 1954 (Left to right: Lee Miller, Leonora Carrington, Ady Fidelin, and Nusch Eluard)
is that really lee miller in 1954?! that babe is AGELESS.
also i would change this title to four badass bitches who were unfortunately always in the shadows of their male counterparts because SEXISM asleep.
(via andibgoode)
jomc:
Can the camera be racist? The question is explored in an exhibition that reflects on how Polaroid built an efficient tool for South Africa’s apartheid regime to photograph and police black people.
The London-based artists Adam Broomberg and Oliver Chanarin spent a month in South Africa taking pictures on decades-old film that had been engineered with only white faces in mind. They used Polaroid’s vintage ID-2 camera, which had a “boost” button to increase the flash – enabling it to be used to photograph black people for the notorious passbooks, or “dompas”, that allowed the state to control their movements.
The result was raw snaps of some of the country’s most beautiful flora and fauna from regions such as the Garden Route and the Karoo, an attempt by the artists to subvert what they say was the camera’s original, sinister intent.
Broomberg and Chanarin say their work, on show at Johannesburg’s Goodman Gallery, examines “the radical notion that prejudice might be inherent in the medium of photography itself”. They argue that early colour film was predicated on white skin: in 1977, when Jean-Luc Godard was invited on an assignment to Mozambique, he refused to use Kodak film on the grounds that the stock was inherently “racist”.
The light range was so narrow, Broomberg said, that “if you exposed film for a white kid, the black kid sitting next to him would be rendered invisible except for the whites of his eyes and teeth”. It was only when Kodak’s two biggest clients – the confectionary and furniture industries – complained that dark chocolate and dark furniture were losing out that it came up with a solution.
The artists feel certain that the ID-2 camera and its boost button were Polaroid’s answer to South Africa’s very specific need. “Black skin absorbs 42% more light. The button boosts the flash exactly 42%,” Broomberg explained. “It makes me believe it was designed for this purpose.” (via ‘Racism’ of early colour photography explored in art exhibition | Art and design | guardian.co.uk)
holy shit.
(via sexartandpolitics)
Francesca Woodman in her studio by Douglas D. Prince, 1976
i’ve never seen this photo of her before. make sense it isn’t a self-portrait, but i still love it to pieces.
(via ateliertovar)
"‘But I never looked like that!’—How do you know? What is the ‘you’ you might or might not look like? Where do you find it—by which morphological or expressive calibration? Where is your authentic body? You are the only one who can never see yourself except as an image; you never see your eyes unless they are dulled by the gaze they rest upon the mirror or the lens (I am interested in seeing my eyes only when they look at you): even and especially for your own body, you are condemned to the repertoire of images."
— Roland Barthes, Roland Barthes by Roland Barthes (via starlit-mire)
