of dislocation & graceful unravelling

juliosalgado83:

For my mami and my sister.

(via permanentaddress)

Tori Amos: “Spark”

brb having all the feelings, all of them.

Myra Greene, from the series My White Friends.

My White Friends extends my 10-year exploration into photography’s description of race. This body of images explores the challenges of describing whiteness and assumptions about social circles. For this body of photographs I ask those close to me who identify as white about the qualities of their racial identity. These color images depict confidants, mentors and peers who have shaped my understanding of identity even though we have different racial profiles. They are attempts to image a racial category that has an intangible description. Some images are documents of my time with friends, others are performances of whiteness by the sitter, and then there are images in which I impose my own stereotypes of whiteness.

— from Myra Greene’s Kickstarter page

This series is amazing & it is all of my favorite things about photography: technically proficient, aesthetically pleasing, simplistic, and hella thought-provoking.

Here’s an article about Myra Greene on the New York Times. I was pretty blown away by the comments section. There are a number of problematic, face-palmy remarks, but overall, discussion is happening amongst people of different races/ethnicities and it is happening in a very respectful and not-so-snarky manner.

& I feel, like, totally overjoyed about that. First, because these important discussions are happening outside the “radical” subculture among “normal” people, and secondly because the discussions are not disintegrating into yr typical chaotically offensive Internet debate…

Aside: I have wavering feelings about the necessity and permissibility of rage when dealing with problematic shit — I mean I get it, anger is a valid and appropriate reaction to oppression, and it’s not the oppressed person’s job to be available 24/7 to teach people how not to be jerks. But I also get that I’ve most effectively learned about things from others and explained about things to others by avoiding sarcasm, snark, anger, and general haughtiness. I don’t know, for me, it comes down to constantly learning how to pick my battles.

In any case, here is art project that just says everything that needs to be said with a title, a statement paragraph, and a handful of pictures. A+

“I don’t want my hair cut, I don’t want my eyebrows up or down — I want them right where they are! And I see no functional advantage in a marvellous mouth.”

— Jo Stockton (Audrey Hepburn) in Funny Face

Sister My Sister (1995)

Pretty sure this is the first film I’ve seen with no (visible) male characters. Five Stars!

Lauren E. Simonutti: Resume

Lauren E. Simonutti, 1968, USA, passed away last week due to complications from her illness. On March 28th, 2006 she started hearing voices and was diagnosed with “rapid cycling, mixed state bipolar with schizoaffective disorder”. She felt she was going mad and spent her last years almost in isolation. She turned the camera on herself and the space she was living in. She has left us with an impressive, honest and strong body of work. With her photographs she gave a voice to those that suffer in isolation.

“Over (five) years I have spent alone amidst these 8 rooms, 7 mirrors, 6 clocks, 2 minds and 199 panes of glass. And this is what I saw here. This is what I learned. I figure it could go one of two ways - I will either capture my ascension from madness to as much a level of sanity for which one of my composition could hope, or I will leave a document of it all, in the case that I should lose.”

(via 500 Photographers)

madamethursday:

[Image: Five multicolor hand drawn illustration of musical legends: Bessie Smith, Ella Fitzgerald, Billie Holiday, Nina Simone and Etta James as they sing.]

kerosenekerosene:

Five of my favorite ladies - Bessie Smith, Ella Fitzgerald, Billie Holiday, Nina Simone, and Etta James. Graphite drawings over watercolor, digitally composited with a little use of the eraser tool in Photoshop. Other than those little circles, unedited.

Prints are available of all but Bessie at www.society6.com/kerosene. Get ‘em while you can! After Bessie is posted, I’ll leave the singles up for a week, before making the set of five together the only option.

(via anarchist-anachronist)

"I never meant to be a sexual object for anyone but my husband. I never thought a picture of my body would be tacked up in men’s bathrooms. I hate men looking at me and thinking what they think. And I know what they think. They write and tell me.

…

It’s uncomfortable because I just simply took a photograph. That’s all my participation was in my poster that sold over a million copies was that I took a photograph that I thought was a dumb photograph. My husband said, ‘Oh, try this thing tied up here, it’ll look beautiful’. And the photographer said ‘the back-lighting is really terrific’. So dealing with someone having that picture up in their… bedroom or their… living room or whatever I think would be hard for anyone to deal with."

Lynda Carter (Wonder Woman) (via WikiPedia)

(Note, I know nothing about Lynda Carter save for what’s on that Wiki page. I found this by accident while Googling my Friend’s name because he said he was named after a cowboy and I wanted to find out but OOPS IT’S THE MALE GAZE.)

afrodiaspores:

Conjure woman from Washington County Georgia and great grandmother of [“Hoodoo and Conjure Quarterly”] artist Inga Kimberly Brown. Brown writes,

I met a new artist friend, Denise Alvarado and she has published a new book of articles and art that have much to do with our relative Voodoo, [what] we call Hoodoo and Root Work. As to my knowledge some of my Grandmother’s definitely lived by this old tradition and practiced it. Some of them did not. When Denise saw a picture of one of my Great Grandmother’s she asked if she could use the picture of my Grandmother Marie Steel in her new journal “Hoodoo and Conjure Quarterly” I said yes and stated that “my Grandma Marie would have loved it I’m sure”.  

Inga’s grandma Marie represents so much of what southern hoodoo is all about. She was black and Cherokee Indian, and that cigar…

(via zulabelle)

"What men mean when they talk about their ‘crazy’ ex-girlfriend is often that she was someone who cried a lot, or texted too often, or had an eating disorder, or wanted too much/too little sex, or generally felt anything beyond the realm of emotionally undemanding agreement. That does not make these women crazy. That makes those women human beings, who have flaws, and emotional weak spots. However, deciding that any behavior that he does not like must be insane– well, that does make a man a jerk.

And when men do this on a regular basis, remember that, if you are a women, you are not the exception. You are not so cool and fabulous and levelheaded that they will totally get where you are coming from when you show emotions other than ‘pleasant agreement.’

When men say ‘most women are crazy, but not you, you’re so cool’ the subtext is not, ‘I love you, be the mother to my children.’ The subtext is ‘do not step out of line, here.’ If you get close enough to the men who say things like this, eventually, you will do something that they do not find pleasant. They will decide you are crazy, because this is something they have already decided about women in general."

Lady, You Really Aren’t “Crazy” (via theramptosilverspring)

(Source: sparkamovement, via recklesschants)