Have a Seat on the Bed

A month or two ago I watched All the Beauty and the Bloodshed, a documentary film about activist and photographer Nan Goldin. Goldin’s photographic work in the 1970s and 1980s largely documented her friends and surrounding community, usually presented in the form of ever-evolving slideshows, with themes heavy on relationships, sex, queerness, and the AIDS epidemic. The film itself is powerful, detailing Goldin’s activism against the makers of pharmaceutical opiates and their involvement in the nation’s opioid crisis, while also chronicling her rising art career. As the film went on, there was one theme I kept seeing in her photographs that struck me: people in bedrooms.

Greer and Robert on the bed, NYC by Nan Goldin

Nan and Brian in bed, NYC by Nan Goldin

Odalisque of the Bowery, NYC by Nan Goldin

Lynelle on my bed, NYC by Nan Goldin

Some of the images feel intimate, such as the first two above, seemingly capturing couples at the end of the night or waking up in the morning. It hardly feels like the photographer is there (although in fact she is literally there in the case of Nan and Brian in bed, NYC.) Others, like the fourth image Lynelle in my bed, NYC, feel half-posed. I imagine Nan spending a lot of time with her friends, winding up in each other’s homes and beds. At times, they barely pay attention to the camera always in Goldin’s hand; at others, they mug for her.

You can google “Nan Goldin bedroom photos” and find a long gallery of results. The fact that she did so much of this is striking to me. I am so rarely in my friends’ bedrooms, and they so rarely in mine. There is an intimacy in the sheer frequency she finds herself in these settings that I almost feel jealous of.

Maybe this is what inspired me. I found myself wanting to photograph people in their bedrooms. I made a Pinterest board. And I texted my friend Amy, who has a lovely bedroom, and is always game to sit in front of a camera. This is the beginning of a series.

All photos in this post, with the exception of the top four taken by Nan Goldin, were shot on Kodak UltraMax 400 35mm film and a Minolta X-700. Thank you for reading, you’re beautiful.

Barbies, Broncos, and Barrels

I have been super-inspired by Barbie lately.

Maybe it’s the impending feature film, or my mother going on Poshmark shopping sprees for Barbie clothes and sharing her finds with me (yes, apparently you can buy Barbie clothes on Poshmark). Whatever it it, I have ideas. In my last post, I used Barbie to explore the relationship between her plastic body and our fleshy human ones, and I like the idea of combining the doll with actual people in future shoots. However, most of my ideas center Barbie as the focus, using a macro lens and carefully chosen locations to imagine what her life could look like.

I photograph a lot of rodeos, so when my mother found a Winking Western Barbie and Ken online, I knew I had to attempt a Barbie rodeo. (I did wind up putting the cowgirl attire on a different Barbie, because the Winking Barbie’s face was damaged). Any new concept takes a few tries to work the kinks out—this may be Barbie’s first rodeo, but I don’t think it’ll be her last. While a thrifted plastic horse came in handy to transform Barbie into a barrel racer, it was the sideline romance of two other characters that became the main story for me. My friend Steven shook his head at me when he found out I used a roll of Lomochrome Purple for this shoot, a specialty film made by Lomography with purple color shifts, but the roll was given to me by another friend who wasn’t entirely sure if she’d shot anything on it, so I didn’t want to save it for anything too precious.

Turns out she had shot it, but just didn’t fully rewind the lead. In some of the below images, you’ll see double exposures that literally add another layer to this already otherworldly western moment.

Thanks for reading, you’re beautiful.

Life in Plastic

I grew up obsessed with Barbie.

She was my favorite toy, and my earliest avenue to imaginary play and fashion. My mother loves Barbie too, and spent hours with me pairing outfits. When we couldn’t afford a real Barbie house, my mother charmed carpet samples off the salesmen at the flooring store across the street, and laid them on the floor in the corner of my bedroom, each colored square representing a different “room” in Barbie’s house. She hung vintage scarves low on the walls to represent Barbie’s posh wallpaper.

My mother never outgrew Barbie, and neither did I. We both still have impressive collections, mostly cobbled together from thrift stores. The majority of mine are unboxed and piled in a basket in my living room; the shelves in my mother’s house are lined with collectible Barbies still pristine in their packaging and interspersed with thrifted dolls dressed in crocheted outfits she finds on Poshmark. Thirty years later, we still sit together on her couch and dig through piles of Barbie clothes.

The Barbie movie, directed by Greta Gerwig, opens in less than two months (the weekend of my birthday!), and the plastic princess has been heavy in media lately. I had the idea for the below photoshoot when thinking about Barbie’s hard plastic smallness in comparison to my body’s soft muchness. A lot has been made of Barbie’s impact on girls’ body image; her proportions have been proved to be nearly impossible for an actual human body to function. The flowing blonde hair, the miniscule waist, the blue doe eyes, all pose a risk to a young person’s developing self-esteem.

But as a child of Barbie, I never thought of her as someone I needed to emulate. She was a vehicle for fun clothing and imaginative adult scenarios I wanted to play-act. It never crossed my mind that I needed to look like Barbie; I simply wanted to use her bendy little body to live out adult life as I saw it in my young mind. I appreciate the more inclusive versions of Barbie that have hit shelves in recent years, but growing up in the eighties, I understood Barbie could be her version of beautiful, and I could be mine.

Which I also credit to my mother, who is brunette and curvy and proud. My mother teaching me that we were beautiful no matter what anyone else looked like, fictious or not, had far more impact on my self-image than the impossible proportions of a doll. I have more ideas for Barbie photoshoots to come this summer, and although I initially was not sure how this one would pan out, I am beyond pleased with the results. It captures everything I had in my heart when I set out to make it, the juxtaposition of Barbie’s femininity versus a real woman’s, and the beauty of both.

As always, comments and thoughts are welcome. Thank you for reading, you’re beautiful.