Deck the Halls

I used jean and a transferred image to make this earring.

Be back January 15th.

Happy Holidays!

First Snow

Robert Frank

Indianapolis, 1956

Indianapolis, 1956 exemplifies the photographer’s craftiness. The place and date are of little help in unraveling the picture’s meaning. The photograph presents an unsmiling pair of motorcyclists at night in a Middle American city. They are staring intently at something between them and the photographer. A crowd of spectators gazes more randomly around the scene. (Woodward, 11-2008)

Silk + Leather

A fashion blog less focused on trends and more on personal style, check it out.

Counterparts

Skin Deep

What is in your cosmetics? Visit Skin Deep: Cosmetic Safety Database

Overheard

“I didn’t know what the guy said, but I saw his sole.”

Glamour

From  condemned witches to femme fatales in Bond movies, Glamour has had an edge of danger through most of American history. In this lecture from Ted Talks the writer and cultural critic Virginia Postrel defines Glamour as :

1 A charm affecting the eye, making objects appear different from what they really are. 2 Witchcraft; magic; a spell. 3 A kind of haze in the air, causing things to appear different than what they really are 4 Any artificial interest in or association with, an object, through which it appears delusively magnified or glorified.

The Afro continues to resonate in youth culture as a glamorous element of fashion from the sixties. It is sometimes misinterpreted as militant despite the fact that it is a natural hairstyle achieved by allowing curly hair to grow. Hair can also have a transcendent quality that makes it glamorous.

This morning while reading  Afro Images: Politics, Fashion and Nostalgia (1994) a critical essay by Angela Davis, I was struck by her frustration at having been reduced to a hairstyle in the popular imagination and the lack of control over the use of her own image in the media. It is interesting to note the recent satirical allusion to her hair on the New Yorker cover from July 2008. This excerpt concludes the text :

Perhaps by (…) “alternative photography” we might develop strategies for engaging photographic images like the ones I have evoked, by actively seeking to transform their interpretive contexts in education, popular culture, the media, community organizing, and so on. Particularly in relation to African American historical images, we need to find ways of incorporating them into social and political memory , instead of using (them) as a substitute which encourages the atrophy of such memory. (Davis, 45)

Leslie Hewitt works in the medium of film and photography to create unique visual archives of history to meditate on her own experience. Similarly Lorna Simpson uses photography and video art to question gender and racial identity. (Underwood, 04-01-07) Recently I was inspired by 81 Press, a fine arts publisher dedicated to publishing books of photography by artists of the African Diaspora and GLBTQ artists. These examples exemplify how people can better reflect their own reality through art, whether it is glamorous or not.

Power couple, James Casebere and Photographer Lorna Simpson

Make My Day

Common released Universal Mind Control this month, check it out. I especially like his collaboration with Cee-Lo and his song What A World.

Listen.

Zora Howard // A Multicultural America // Obama And The Politics Of Being Biracial