Monthly Archives: January 2016

Luscious Bodies: Lascivious Backlash

Laurie and Debbie say:

In Australia, the handmade cosmetics company Lush has launched an advertising campaign called “Go Naked,” which, as Brad Esposito at BuzzFeed reports, has met with both praise and opposition.

four happy naked women from the back, touching each other

Most responses to the campaign have been positive,says Courtney Fry, an employee and one of the models:

“We have also had requests from customers wanting to continue the campaign in store and pose for the photo themselves as they felt it helped their children grow up feeling that their bodies are natural and normal, not something to be ashamed of and have our insecurities exploited for the sale of cosmetics.”

but a few complaints caused the Australian Advertising Standards Board to declare the images “pornographic” and ask Lush to remove them from a mall in Queensland, which the company agreed to do.

Laurie's photograph of five fat nudes at Baker Beach in San Francisco

These images are close to our hearts. Laurie’s photograph above, from Women En Large, is fine art and not advertising, but the commonalities with the Lush campaign are very real. Both, for very different purposes, are committed to showing real bodies, women comfortable together, and satisfied with who they are.

While it’s no surprise that a small portion of the population finds these images disturbing and inappropriate, it’s interesting to think about why. The complaints quoted in the BuzzFeed article are all about what children will see: the images were apparently on large billboards at eye level.

three women with triangular solid shower gel covering their private parts

To worry about children seeing these photographs, you have to make several assumptions. So many parents displace their own fears, discomforts, and learned objections onto their children.

First, they assume it’s inappropriate for children to see nudity (or certain kinds of nudity). Why? Because children can be (“because I am”) unsettled and confused by sexuality (which we are bombarded with in thousands of ways every day) and somehow sexuality and nudity have become conflated, even though almost everyone is nonsexually nude for at least some moments every day.

Second, they assume it’s inappropriate for children to see (“for me to see”) certain kinds of touch. The women touching each others’ butts in the top advertisement are not engaging in sexual behavior, but they are engaging in intimate touch, and many people have no concept of intimate nonsexual touch, so the connection must be sexual or it would have no context and be incomprehensible.

Third, these images raise fears that your child might become a Lesbian, or bring home a fat sweetheart, or whatever combination of fears you have for your child’s puberty, adolescence, and adulthood.

Finally, and most threatening, pictures like these (and like Laurie’s) normalize a kind of body comfort and comfort with other bodies which children might (“oh, how horrible, I might”) begin to believe is okay, or even something to look for in life.

Lush has the right idea:

Lush’s Australasia director, Peta Granger, said the decision from the ASB would not affect the way they advertise in the future.

“We want our messages to empower people, not make them feel awful about themselves over a body that is probably not ever real due to how much it’s been digitally ‘enhanced’.”

Memory Landscapes: Shadow Pictures

Laurie says:

My current digital project is called “Memory Landscapes”, a feminist visual memoir. Below is a brief description of the project. The gallery is here and a much fuller description of the project is here.

Memory is a form of time travel through your own time line. A visual memoir takes you into the artist’s time line and lets you choose your paths through their lives. I started thinking about memory, and how what is remarkable is not how much we forget, but how much we remember. I realized that my memories are not linear – because ‘inside the head everything happens at once.’ (Penelope Lively) Linear narrative is a useful construct, but it’s not how we actually remember.

I want to re-engage with the memories of my life, to create an autobiographical visual memoir, to express the poetics of non-linear time. Memories are filtered, by who we are now, who we were then, and what has happened in between. We view our past through layers of memories, and the past is everything that happened except this moment. It will eventually be on iPad app that creates an aesthetic of memory.

The iPad’s technical possibilities allow me to create an aesthetic of memory, reflecting the way that memories in the brain are a series of contingent associations. If you tap an image within the picture, it can link to another image, voice, or text, and these links can continue on. So you can have an aesthetic of memory, associations, connections and layers. Like our memories, the associations and connections can change.  I’m creating an experience modeled on the way we live in our memories.

One of the major photos with the associative memory threads is here.

These photos are images that may be part of the aesthetic of memory, where rather than have your mind go from one associative memory to another, instead it goes very briefly to a space that is not about remembering but simply about being. I’m in a place where I am considering things rather than making decisions.

These are 3 of the photos I’m considering. Now that I’m thinking about this I’m finding images as I walk around in the world.

Shadows Roxbury 3finalweb

This one is from some of the photos I took in Roxbury in upstate New York.

Pavement Shadowsfinalweb

These shadows are from a bare plum tree in front of my building.

Guerrero Church Shadows finalweb

The sky view is from the Mission in San Francisco.

I’m going to be very interested in how these resonate for people. And I expect I’ll be putting up more of them as I continue to think about this.