Laurie Says: Paul Longmore died in August. I didn’t know him personally but we sometimes worked with the same people. I was very much aware of his presence as a strong advocate for disability rights. He was an activist who helped recast the paradigm of the problem of disability.  His work placed it mainly out [...]

Laurie Says: Artist and Curator of the Impossible d’Arci Bruno does work I admire.  This is a video of her exploration of huge graffiti pieces in an enormous decaying warehouse in Alameda that will soon be condemned. She’s a great tour guide showing exciting work that is about to disappear forever. As she says, It’s [...]

Debbie says: A few weeks ago, I wrote about the BP oil spill as a source of fashion photography, working from a post by Lisa at Sociological Images. Now, Lisa is back with a very different disturbing take on the greater subject. These shoes are the Bed Stu “Cleanup Collection,” designed to look as though [...]

Debbie says: I’ve apparently come late to the Montana Fishburne party, since I just learned about the story yesterday. For those of you who’ve been living under the rock next to mine, Montana Fishburne is the daughter of acclaimed actor Laurence Fishburne, who is African-American. At the age of 18, Montana decided to perform in [...]

Lynne Murray says: I first heard of feminist artist Brenda Oelbaum’s Venus of Willendorf sculptures made from diet books through the fat activist mailing list. She explains in more detail about the work on her blog. This is a Venus from 2009.  The present project sculptures are much smaller but this image was irresistible. Lots [...]

Hagiwara Hiroko has recently written an introduction to Women of Japan.   A dean and professor at Osaka Prefecture University, she is a feminist scholar and activist who who has written extensively on issues of gender, race, art and history in the context of cultural and women’s studies. As one of the first women I photographed [...]

Laurie says: In an article in the NY Times, Natalie Angier talks to scientists in the field and discusses why we perceive some harmless animals as ugly.  Some of the explanations for our reactions are very problematical, but I thought the subject was fascinating. Our culture is obsessive about beauty and rarely considers anything more [...]

Debbie says: One of my most frequent rants in the last ten years is one I haven’t aired much on this blog: I really resent the way that the media seem to me to be more and more inclined to treat outright lies as “opinions” and give them equal time with facts, as if “The [...]

Laurie and Debbie say: Maegan La Mala at Vivirlatino has a short and powerful rant about “anchor babies”: … how women of color, women like me and so many of my hermanas and vecinas, are being talked about instead of talked with or listened to. How our wombs are worded as weapons of mass destruction [...]

Debbie says: WARNING: Seriously potentially triggering images of dead-looking women amid oil spill damage. Remember heroin chic? Now it’s oil spill chic. Lisa at Sociological Images shares with us Vogue Italia’s photo spread “Women and Oil” in which the BP Deepwater Horizon disaster is appropriated into an “edgy” fashion shoot. Lisa says: I see nothing [...]