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‘Fat’ is usually the first insult a girl throws at another girl when she wants to hurt her.
I mean, is ‘fat’ really the worst thing a human being can be? Is ‘fat’ worse than ‘vindictive’, ‘jealous’, ‘shallow’, ‘vain’, ‘boring’ or ‘cruel’? Not to me; but then, you might retort, what do I know about the pressure to be skinny? I’m not in the business of being judged on my looks, what with being a writer and earning my living by using my brain…
I went to the British Book Awards that evening. After the award ceremony I bumped into a woman I hadn’t seen for nearly three years. The first thing she said to me? ‘You’ve lost a lot of weight since the last time I saw you!’
‘Well,’ I said, slightly nonplussed, ‘the last time you saw me I’d just had a baby.’
What I felt like saying was, ‘I’ve produced my third child and my sixth novel since I last saw you. Aren’t either of those things more important, more interesting, than my size?’ But no – my waist looked smaller! Forget the kid and the book: finally, something to celebrate!
I’d rather they were independent, interesting, idealistic, kind, opinionated, original, funny – a thousand things, before ‘thin’. And frankly, I’d rather they didn’t give a gust of stinking chihuahua flatulence whether the woman standing next to them has fleshier knees than they do. Let my girls be Hermiones, rather than Pansy Parkinsons.
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24th October 2011
Reblogged From mendmyheart
Notes: 51227
“Noam Galai’s photography was stolen hundreds of times for years without his knowledge. This is his story. ”
Interesting video about the shift in cultural view of copyright and stock images.
I came across this article not too long ago linked from a comment over at badscience about whistleblowers. While the article itself is fairly old (2004), it opens the reader to the other side of whistleblowing, the people being accused. I thought this was particularly relevant and interesting given the recent wikileaks debacle. Now, don’t get me wrong, I am a strong advocate of transparency specially when it comes to government and social freedoms. I just think people need to be mindful of what it is they are actually standing for when pointing the finger. Following anti-establishment propaganda is just as bad as following the government blindly.
“I’ve been working on a new portfolio recently as I haven’t had one if 5 years, and the agents have been bugging! Spending the time and money to do it right while it’s winter….anyway, working with my retoucher Bianca on a lot of images, and we had a fun little back and forth conversation about retouching, womens self image, the good, the bad, and the ugly of it all…”
While travelling, I came across this really good example of why you should not use stock photography for your magazine cover :) Either that or the photographer thought he’d save costs by doing the same shoot for two different magazines.
- Camera: iPhone 3GS
- Aperture: f/2.8
- Exposure: 1/15th
- Focal Length: 3mm
I was recently reading this article about footage taken from the Haiti earthquake zone. The work discussed was shot by Khalid Mohtaseb and spawned an immense debate about video journalism and what constitutes the latter. Here’s a quote from Khalid explaining what he set out to do:
“Almost all the images and videos coming out of Haiti had become all too familiar and I knew that was not how I wanted to capture a story of this significance. The idea that life goes on even in the most horrific state of despair was fascinating to me and getting that concept across was my main goal in shooting this montage. I wanted to focus on the Haitian people and the lives that had been affected by this devastating earthquake as well as showcase how modern technology can revolutionize journalism and the way news coverage is shot.”
But after watching this video, I felt that while the visuals were interesting and nicely composed for the most part, there was no purpose nor emotion evoked within me by what should have otherwise been a very evocative subject matter. In fact I would maybe go as far as to say that the heavy use of grading, the general lack of meaningful story-telling (or at least one the viewer can follow) and the choice of shots left me wondering whether this was reality or fiction and left me with no real empathy for these people. The more successful shots were probably the ones of the people there but even then, it felt very shallow for something of that magnitude.
A few of the comments that really struck home to me were:
“…every shot is a moral question.” -AndresAquilo
and
“So what I think upsets fellow doc/journo photographers and videographers the most, is seeing praise in work that could be done very easily. I can back that up by saying look at vimeo and you’ll see all the copycat F-academy productions on there. Even on this site, which is sort of confusing I suppose. Dan being a news photographer, It doesn’t feel like content matters, only the quality of image/footage.” -taylorgary
and this got me thinking about how with the advent of DSLRs with video capabilities, lots of people were jumping in on the video bandwagon, being able to produce excellent quality images but at the same time forgetting the story-telling and the content. It is very easy to get lost in the wonders of making your next technical showreel and forget the context of it, something I shall try not to lose sight of.
