Post: #1

look at this:
http://jezebel.com/5986608/16+year+old-w...-editorial

i found this link on facebook from a black friend of mine. she posted it saying it was avant garde, an interesting idea. and i agreed. as a photographer myself, my first thought was: this is cool as fuck. i never wouldve thought of this shit. dark skinned people are hard to expose, its hard to make them shine without oiling their skin which then results in a gross bounce of flash from their skin. the finish isnt as good as it could be. bronzing a white girl simply allows more control over the tone of skin.

now, the original fb post incited a slew of heated comments... all from white women. they said this was opressive, and linked it back to slavery citing this is an extension of hatred that no white person could ever really understand, and that we should do what we can to put an end to this kind of work.

i went on to explain my case from a photographical standpoint, explaining the process i imagined went into creating this, but they derailed it, saying i was pushing racism, being a supporter of segregation, that im part of a problem that persists in our society only to be pushed under the rug by whites. they wouldnt acknowledge that this is just art and has absolutely no weight on any social issue on the planet and that they are making it one with their self victimization.

im literally dumbfounded. this kind of attitude -- this victimizing attention driven behavior is probably the biggest reason we still have problems. not only racism, for this is the exact same mindset that is instilled and thrusted by feminists. its backwards, it disregards creativity at the expense of futile feelings that really shouldnt be so easy to hurt in the first place.

im not making this to start a race thread, im making this because this scared the shit out of me. this showed me that there are thousands that adopt this mindset and are hellbent on spreading it to everyone they come in contact with. if this persists i imagine you will be considered a monster for pushing the limits in the artistic medium.

and thatll suck dick


and probably mean only fat models will only be in style




btw the model is p cute and a huge motivation for me to shoot for the fucking stars with studio photo and gtfo of photojournalism:
http://www.fordmodelsblog.com/editorials...july-2012/

Post: #2

I think it's funny how these women are trying to twist it into a race issue. The content is not as important as the intent. They want to shut up discussion altogether. It is never explicitly stated, but if feminists ran the world, there'd be a lot of shit that got censored simply for being offensive.

Yet none of them complain about makeup, airbrushing, or the WonderBra, which are all forms of false advertisement. I'm not bitching either, but if you're going to bitch about a photoshoot where a white girl looks like a black girl, you have no right to not also bitch about ugly chicks looking hotter than they're supposed to be.

I was reading through the comments and I read the phrase

"models working twice as hard"

and I about shit myself laughing. Models have one job and one job alone; to look hotter than their competition. If that means they have to wear a furry suit, bleach their hair, or put a tattoo on their assholes, then that's the trend.

I fucking hate the amount of presumption in the comments section. I don't like engaging the jizzabells on their level when it comes to race issues (because I can never win), but some of those comments make me want to create an account just to spam the comments section. The sheer amount of "you have a privilege so you have no idea what its like" shaming is fucking absurd. By their logic, people with no libido have a privilege that people with active libidos don't have because people with no libidos don't understand how terribly frustrating it is not to get laid on a regular basis.

It reminds me of the feminist drivel "dog and the lizard" story where the dog doesn't feel how cold it is, so he turns down the metaphorical thermostat, which screws with the lizard. What's funny about the feminist's shitty little metaphor is that they disprove their entire philosophy with that story; what are the lizards doing trying to compete with the dog for heat in the first place? Not only is it an oversimplification, but it suggests that the power between the genders is not zero sum (which it totally fucking is). The lizard could also choose to go to the kitchen where it's warmer.

I had a lot of friends in highschool who would make such emotional arguments and I always knew they were wrong on some level, but I could never engage them in an argument because it would end in them yelling some emotionally loaded bullshit. Oddly enough, they were liberal and probably have low testosterone levels.

Post: #3

I always think it's weird when white people care more about stupid "racist" shit than minorities. Like they think "those poor, stupid minorities need my help!" to make themselves feel good.

Post: #4

(02-26-2013 12:34 AM)houston Wrote:  I always think it's weird when white people care more about stupid "racist" shit than minorities. Like they think "those poor, stupid minorities need my help!" to make themselves feel good.

I don't know what I feel about this. I'm not offended but im not sure if I should be offended. Now if they did blackface, that would be another story. blackface is so racist and outlandish.

Post: #5

im offended that my right to freedom of expression in due time might be blocked. not many people in mainstream media seem to really give a shit, which is unsettling.

Post: #6

(02-26-2013 12:34 AM)houston Wrote:  I always think it's weird when white people care more about stupid "racist" shit than minorities. Like they think "those poor, stupid minorities need my help!" to make themselves feel good.

Instead of celebrating the art for what it is, the white chicks create the racism issue themselves when nobody even thought about it in the first place.

Post: #7

I can't reply to the article, but I had some posts along the lines of

"So there's only black and white people in Africa? So what about the 200 million Arabs and Berbers, or do these not count as they are only 20-25% of the continent's population? Do you as a privileged white woman need to hold my hand and let me know when I'm being racially abused? As a minority do I need your help to realise when I've been sidelined? Am I so far beneath your white holiness queen that I can not point out these things myself?'

man it would have got hamsters whirring.

Post: #8

While I don't think this I s a race issue. And I don't think the artist did this with intention....but it is a little " off" to paint a white girl brown and call her African queen.

It doesn't matter that there are white people in Africa. It's the context.

I've seen wonderful artistic photos of black models. If its so hard to photograph black models...it would simply speak more of the artist and photography. That they had more skill.

One might say,tht he cheated by bronzing a white model

Post: #9

@sourcecode i imagine they tried that and liked this shot the most. i really doubt bronzing a white girl was their initial intent when starting this project

Post: #10

For some reason I'm reminded of a post by Maddox about the PC use of "African-American" instead of calling someone black. It seems that for a while there it was really un-PC to use the word "black".

What if someone is Jamaican? What if they're a black person in the U.K.? The term African-American, if anything, is even more offensive and narrow-minded because it draws more assumptions about that person than any other term.

On an unrelated note, I was working on this project of mine cataloguing the Family, Genus, and Species of commonly used food products, and I was pleased to discover that watermelon originated in Africa.

Post: #11

In that particular field, if you have to work "TWICE as half for barely half the recognition" it means you only have one quarter the talent.

Post: #12

(02-26-2013 02:05 PM)DarkTriad Wrote:  In that particular field, if you have to work "TWICE as half for barely half the recognition" it means you only have one quarter the talent.

Let's look at the WHOLE quote that you snipped that out of...

More than 150 people have commented on author Laura Beck’s article, including this one from “fashionlady”

“Can I just say as a young black model (I'm a girl) having worked my ass for the past 3 years, this hurts my soul. I'm happy for Ondria as a person but the amount of times I have been told ‘oh sorry we already have a black girl that looks like you’ or ‘most of our clients dont hire black girls, sorry’ and then I see THIS, it pisses me off! There are so many beauitful black models out there working TWICE as hard for barely half the recognition and the only time they give a shit about us is when they need our dark skin for some ‘ethnic’ photo shoot and in this case with Ondria, they couldn't even be bothered. Can I see a black girl do SCANDANAVIAN PRINCESS please? Hmmm?”

The piece of your post I bolded really isn't true. If you know anything about the industry, non-white girls are still referred to as "exotics," as if somehow non-white girls are uncommon in this day and age. You can't ignore the fact that 82% of fashion week models were white, and it's hard for non-white girls to get the same work that white girls do, regardless of whether or not they're built the same way. Designers and magazine editors simply don't think women of color are as attractive, no matter how pretty they are. That's the real issue behind this. It has nothing to do with "talent" per se.

This also goes back to a time when white actors were made up to look like other ethnicities, instead of hiring an actor of that ethnicity. So yeah, it stings when someone does an "African Queen" spread and uses a white model with make-up to darken her skin. Even the top black models of other generations talk about having to do their own make-up and hair, because make-up artists couldn't be bothered with learning how to do up women of color. White models didn't have to do that - they got taken care of, and didn't have to supply their own equipment and accessories. While the photographer's intent may have been something totally different, you can't escape what a photograph like this means in the larger context.