Feminist Photoset Time!

(Reblogged from come correct)

Truth:

Reblogged from Sex Love & Liberation.

Fact: I reallllllllly wanna do it again. But with someone less embarrassed/more experienced than my last photographer...she wasn't totally comfortable, and that dimmed the mood for me. She was trying to keep it pure, and I want someone to let it be sexual.

Textureeeee

Reblogged from Currently Obsessed with...

This really makes me want to see the pictures that woman took of me and my friend C's heads at the naturals meetup we went to in NYC. She had a fancy camera and was really interested in our textures. She worked for Essence. 

Also, swingsets. <3

(1)ne Drop: A project i'm DEFINITELY interested in:

You know anything that touches upon what it means to be Black today will find its way onto my radar sooner or later. When academics and artists join forces, what can result but beauty and a sense of the profound? This project aims not only to challenge people's understandings of Blackness, but also to challenge the way we expect understandings to be challenged, and that in and of itself is beautiful. Watch the promotional video:

This is a fairly accurate representation of how I plan to rock my cap in my senior portrait on Wednesday:

Reblogged from Currently Obsessed with...

I hope think I'll be able to make it work.

My stomach is in KNOTS right now

because I just scheduled my Senior Portrait appointment for less than a week from now. 4pm next Wednesday. My SENIOR. PORTRAITS. Because I'm a senior and my life as I know it is racing to an end. My appointment was confirmed by an email that began, "Congratulations on your upcoming graduation." 

If that wasn't enough to stress me out (guess what? It is.), I don't like that we're given a "drape" there. Can't we all just wear a black shirt or something? How will I coordinate jewelry, makeup, and hair to go with my outfit if I don't know what I'm wearing in the picture? 

And hair. This sitting involves pictures in my cap and gown. A) I don't want to THINK about a cap and gown, let alone be photographed in one. B) FROS AND CAPS DON'T MIX. At all. And I could put all sorts of effort into restraining at least the top part of my hair with clips and pins so that the cap could fit over it, but then my hair would be restrained and down in my cap-less pictures too, and as a woman who wears a huge kinky-curly fro every day, I want to look like myself in my graduation pictures! My hair isn't manipulable enough when it's dry to take the cap-less pictures in full fro first and then pin it back and put it haphazardly under the cap somehow for the capped pics. But I feel like my mother will kill me if I don't have a picture with my cap on. 

I'm getting a zit right between my eyebrows as we speak. I really hope it'll be gone by next week. My skin has generally been freaking out since I've been back on campus, and I'm scared that if I double my efforts to clear it up this week, it will just retaliate by breaking out even further.

I have a really bad history with school pictures. And I don't mean just like, ah we were all so awkward in middle school bad history. I mean like, my mother wouldn't even buy any of my high school senior portraits because they were that bad. Portraits make me nervous. I have this tendency to smile really wide when I'm nervous. And when I smile really wide, a few unfortunate things happen. These are arranged in order from least to most problematic: 1) The gap between my two front teeth, which I find endearing most (but not all) of the time, is showcased. 2) My cheeks scrunch up like a chubby little baby's, and sometimes my dimples even appear. 3) Depending upon the angle of the photograph, I appear to have a double chin. These three things occasionally all happen at once, which evidently creates a face even my mother can't love.

Long story short: this next week is going to be an exercise in seeing how acne-and-stray-hair-free I can make my face. It will perhaps involve practicing manipulating my dry hair into some sort of pulled back form that would allow for the placing of a cap on my head. It will undoubtedly be quite stressful for me, which is going to work directly against the acne-freeing-goal.

I really want to have a senior portrait. When I go to friends' houses and see theirs from high school, I sometimes get really sad and jealous. If these go well, my family will blow ridiculous amounts of money ordering lots of prints, and this will find its way into practically every living room of a person who is related to me. If they don't go well, it will just be one more in a long line of photographic disappointments I have brought my family. My last portrait, for my eating club's faceboard last year, went so well that I spent my own money to buy copies for my family; I'm hoping to repeat that stroke of good luck with this, but the chances seem slim. I'm so worried already. This matters. And that means my body will probably work against me to mess it up.        

Someday I'm going to find a field of wildflowers

not a metaphorical field of flowers, but an actual field bursting with glorious color, along the side of a random road somewhere, and make whoever's driving me pull over and run with me into the hues. I have wanted pictures of my hair amongst the flowers for a long time, but this photograph has reawakened the desire.

Reblogged from 18° 15' N, 77° 30' W

This also makes me want to start experimenting with scarves...

Confession: about half of the time I see an artsy nude pic (of a regular-looking person)nowadays, I really want to do a second shoot. 

Reblogged from 18° 15' N, 77° 30' W

 *wonders if she could pull this off by herself somehow*

Something Small to Make Me Smile

Reblogged from ThoughtCatalog, which is evidently a place I need to spend more time. Yes, I like to take pictures of myself. Yes, I think I am beautiful. No, I am not [ridiculously] vain. Yes, I do think chillin with my besties is a photo opportunity waiting to happen, even if we're going to the same beach or the same bowling alley week after week. Even if we're chilling in my downstairs bathroom making funny faces in the mirror. Because when we are all old and grey, those moments will be our lives more than will fancy events--we should have it all documented, so we can never forget the small moments. 

I Think We Need More Pictures Of Ourselves

Aug. 6, 2011

By Chelsea Fagan

Chelsea is a student and writer living in Paris.

Read more »

You know, I think that we’re doing pretty well as a generation. We’re a little too into instant gratification, maybe, and we may have somewhat entitled expectations for our careers, but I think we’re okay, everything considered. We’ve had to deal with the internet, and given that 95 percent of our population isn’t battling a debilitating porn addiction, I think we can report a pretty decent batting average. That said, though, I think there’s one thing we definitely need some more of: pictures of us in all of our various activities.

Let’s be honest, we’re beautiful. And even if we weren’t, we’re all good enough photo editors to make up for it. There’s nothing that five minutes on Photoshop won’t fix. And when our grandkids ask us one day why all the photos of us are so flawless and well-lit, well, we’ll just tell them that we were gorgeous and jealousy is ugly, shut up.

And it’s not just in the most important or exciting times in our life that we need to be taking more photos. Sure, at our weddings, graduations, or particularly well-attended keggers, the cameras will be at the ready. But for things like going to the movies, sitting in a friend’s room, or trying a new dress on in a changing room, we need to be more vigilant about getting a good shot from every angle. You never know which one is going to make you look that perfect combination of thin and effortless, and you’re gonna want at least two dozen to choose from.

The thing to remember is that you are extremely interesting, and people need to see more of you–of all of us. We should be making more of an effort to document the moments where we’re bored in our rooms and experimenting with how pouty our lips can look on a webcam. If we don’t save these moments, how will anyone know they happened? The idea that people could think that we weren’t savvy or considerate enough to freeze these moments for public enjoyment is a transgression that can no longer be forgiven. We have cameras, we know how to use them, there are no more excuses.

What is most important, in the grand scheme of things, is showing each other how wonderful and fabulous and interesting our lives are. The unexamined life is not worth living, and the un-photographed life is for sociopaths and recluses. Cool people do cool things and take cool pictures of them–just think of celebrities. What do we want from them? Photos of them carrying out their daily minutia. And if we become cool–if we look good, make a lot of acquaintances with money, show up at the right parties–strangers will start taking pictures of us. It’s a beautiful ecosystem of pictures, and you don’t want to be on the bottom of the food chain.

So get out there, take your camera, your camera phone, your webcam, and your insufferable film camera that you will later scan the pictures from like the massive tool you are, and start shooting. Because at the end of the day, if there aren’t 2,000 pictures of you on Facebook, you’re pretty much a pedophile.