Print & Pattern
This book has been curated by Bowie Style, the author of the Print & Pattern blog which was one of the first blogs I ever subscribed to via RSS!
Past & Present: Paisley on Design*Sponge
If you’re interested in the history of the paisley motif and issues of cultural appropriation, you should check this out for starters. You might get an insight into why I find paisley so fascinating!
Tibetan sky burial photographs
A huge warning here – these photos depict death and gore, do not click if you prefer not to see photos of that nature. I’m fascinated with death and ritual, and how different people have developed their traditions in line with their worldview and environmental considerations. This Buddhist burial ritual is shocking to me as a white person in a first world country, whose only dealings with death have been quite sanitary and polite, however I can also see the beauty in the sky burial. I don’t believe in resurrection or an afterlife or reincarnation, but I do believe that we are all returned to the earth and this tradition is very much in line with my worldview.
SP 2010 Speaker – Jessica Hische from Semi Permanent on Vimeo.
I love Jessica’s work and her sense of humour. I wish I’d been at Sydney’s Semi-Permanent conference, the line up was fantastic!
Unretouched Photos: Empowering or Just More ‘Empower-tainment’?
A really interesting commentary from the Ms. Magazine blog on the slew of unretouched photos and plus size models seen in mainstream magazines recently. I haven’t said much on the issue because I’m curious to see what happens next, but for a lot of media observers it has just been a bunch of “empower-tainment” porn rather than meaningful progression and discussion about body image.
Adventures in Feministory: Estelle Getty
I miss seeing Sophia Petrillo on tv. Why don’t we see any amazing stereotype-busting roles featuring older women these days, especially after Golden Girls?
Also Roseanne. Just because I felt like it! How amazing was she? Wait, don’t answer that, just repeat after me: VERY.
The Alot is Better Than You at Everything
Let Hyperbole and a Half help you with your pesky Alot problems! I get so many chortles out of this blog – if you’re not subscribed, what the hell are you still doing reading my blog?
Sky burial: I would definitely like to look into something like that.
As you might imagine, I'm amused by the whole furore regarding “natural” vs. “retouched” photos. I find it baffling that anyone with an IQ higher than 80 looks at a retouched photo and is confused as to whether this is reality or not. It's like looking at a Picasso and thinking, “okay, that's what a person looks like.” Do people really not know the difference between fantasy and reality? Even as a kid I understood that magazines were escapist fluff, not to be taken seriously except maybe as a social art form.
I also worry about the slippery slope if we start telling photographers that they can't retouch their images. Because as I was discussing with a fellow photographer a few days ago, things like lighting and makeup make a much bigger difference in “altering” the final image than Photoshop does. So what next, we won't be allowed to use lighting or makeup in fashion photography? Hell, why not go all-out and forbid women from wearing makeup on the street, since it presents them in a way that's not an accurate representation of how they really look?
I think a better solution is, as usual, education. People are smart enough to look at a magazine photo and know that it's a professional shoot in a studio with lights and makeup and computer enhancements. We're not idiots. I like magazines to be about fantasy – it's fun, in the way that watching TV programmes with crazy plot lines is fun. No one actually thinks the protagonist is a real guy who has magic powers and can see the future.
I just don't want to see it get to a point with this “omg that's not an accurate representation of reality we're giving people the wrong idea” hysteria where art and entertainment are fully regulated, and we're only allowed to portray things based on a strict, arbitrary, government-decided definition of what is “real”.