Are We Having Fun Yet?

The day I took these photos, my dear friend Parker accompanied me to the beach for a sunrise daytrip. I was hoping to capture some surfers, but it was early in the season and the sea was flat. I’d brought along a few Barbie and Ken dolls, plus some beach accessories for them, to continue work on my series of Barbie portraits and editorial photography, and in the absence of waves, wound up spending most of my roll on those.

Parker went for a swim and traipsed along the beach as I set up, and on his way back to our blanket, watching me attempt to root a Barbie’s feet into the sand, asked, “Are you having fun?”

In that moment, I wasn’t exactly. Lying low in the sand, my bathing suit creeping up my ass, the rising sun bright against my face, trying to figure out the best angle to make this plastic doll appear real. I tried to explain to Parker that staging these shots felt like work to me, that I was creating a body of work, that I was trying to make something, that this was art, aware the whole time that my explanation felt a little ridiculous coming from a woman wriggling in the sand surrounded by a bunch of Barbie dolls.

Although I just got this roll of film processed (shout out to another pal Dilly), it was one of my earlier Barbie shoots from the beginning of the summer. As the project has continued to develop, I’ve thought a lot about the direction I’d like it to take, and also about how I feel when I’m making it. I’ve always bristled when people associate my creative pursuits with fun. I love the things I do, the photos I take, the words I write, but I don’t do them for fun, and I think I’ve always felt defensive around the use of that word.

But this project is fun.

It’s so fun, and I don’t think I really tapped into that until recently, after shooting half a dozen Barbie sets and seeing the images come back from the film lab, imagining what other scenarios I can place my plastic subjects in and make them feel alive. That’s the goal, I think, with each of these shoots—I want viewers to forget for a moment that they’re looking at a doll, and feel as though Barbie and Ken are real people, maybe in some way a version of who we imagined them to be when we play-acted adulthood with them as children.

Lately I’ve tabled at a handful of makers’ markets and zine fests, and brought a book of 4x6 Barbie prints sold for a dollar or two each. They’ve killed. I sell more Barbie prints at these things than anything else. And yes, Barbie is having a moment right now due to her blockbuster big screen debut, but the Barbie-mania exploded the way it did because millions of people out there love Barbie, and have been waiting for that explosion. Watching the faces of customers flipping through my Barbie album at markets, the manifestation of their childhood fantasies about Barbie’s real life brought to print, that is what makes this fun. Being able to connect my own lifelong obsession with others, tapping into our core memories of being children and imagining through our dolls what grownup life is really like, and seeing how I can make that life feel creative and magical and maybe a little funny and maybe a little racy.

And I get to play with my Barbies all the time. This month I have a print on a wall in an art gallery, a black and white portrait of Barbie reclining in only her underwear. I get to make art that resonates with people, and I get to have a good time doing it.

Parker.

The images in this post were shot on Seagull 100 film that expired in 1990. Aside from some very basic color correction during the scanning process and little exposure/contrast adjustment, these photos are not edited for effect. Thank you for reading, you’re beautiful.

Shots Fired

I started Thicket of Trash in late 2017, around the same time I was ending a toxic, abusive relationship. The project began as an exploration of self-portraits and collaborations with friends, taking photos of myself and of each other, using our faces and bodies and wardrobes as media to compose what we hoped were interesting images. It felt freeing to know that, alone in my apartment with a point-and-shoot digital camera and a tripod, I had everything I needed to make something beautiful.

The toxic ex referred to the work as “glamour shots.” He meant for the term to be diminishing, a way to trivialize what I was doing. By the time he said this, I had already broken up with him, and his words held less power than they had in the past. I love glamour. I’m usually hoping to capture some element of it when I photograph myself, and while I know that he didn’t mean to say my photos were glamorous, but rather to compare them to the studio portraits popular in the eighties and nineties in which women (and sometimes men) would get all dolled up and have their picture taken for the sake of vanity, it buoyed me to know he was threatened enough by something in them to try to make them smaller.

I go through phases of self-portaiture. Some years I photograph myself a lot; some years I concentrate the lens outward. I focus heavily on analog photography (film) in all my work, but there is something refreshing in the quick digital home session, an impromptu urge to swipe on some lipstick and get in my bathtub, fire off a handful of frames, see what comes out. I took these photos last night in my tub, and was reminded of my ex’s comment as I sat on my couch editing them. They are glamour shots, and thank you.

All images shot on Sony 6100 and edited with VSCO. Thanks for reading, you’re beautiful.

Gentle Creature

Off the top of my head, I can’t think of anyone else I know who has both of their armpits tattooed, aside from Amy.

“You said this one was the worst, you threw up after. And you couldn’t finish the color on the other one,” her girlfriend Alex commented the day I photographed Amy’s tattoos.

“Yeah, it’s still not done,” Amy said. “He had to stop on this one. So the one that’s finished, we finished it, and then I threw up. And then a couple months later, I went back to get the other one, and it got so swollen he said—this is what he said to me: ‘I cannot work on this anymore right now, it is like tofu.’ And I had never eaten tofu at that time, but I knew that it wasn’t a good thing. And I felt like fucking tofu, whatever that shit was. And I was like, wrap me up, sir! And he said, 'When you’re healed up, you can come back and get that done again,’ and I was like, willlll dooo. And then I never went. And that was like twenty fucking years ago. And I would never go back now! Never. I would never do that. There’s no fucking way. If I had one done right now, and they were like, ‘Do the other one,’ I’d be like no sir, I’m good, thank you.”

“I have two tattoos by two different men who chose to take an early exit. She’s new, within the last few years. This was someone who’d been a friend for a while before they were a tattoo artist, and when he was apprenticing, he was working on these specific girl-heads. And he put up something saying he was nearing the end of his apprenticeship and was working for tips while he finished up some things and got himself right, like ready to do it. So I went in and got this tattoo. And it took him a long time. I felt like he was nervous. It took him a really long time, longer than I expected. No big deal. We were chatting, we were friends. And then towards the end he was like, ‘I’m sorry this is taking so long, I just really want it to be good.’ And I was like, we’re good, man. You take your time. And then I think he died that year.”

“And then I have these birds on my back that I got from a person who died within a couple of years of giving them to me. And they were like a third tattoo. I got them in my very early twenties. And then my friend James, Sailor Jim’s Electric Tattoo, took a pen and drew all the rest of it around those birds.”

“Richard did this one, this was a tattoo trade. A St. Christopher spider, people call it a banana spider. An orb weaver. The zipper pattern down the middle of their web is to camouflage them. They’re freaking awesome. They’re really smart and really territorial, and they will return to the same spaces again and again, if it’s a spot that they like. So two or three summers in a row, I had one in the back bedroom window, and also in the front window, but like, right in the window. Almost the whole summer. So I’m like watching her do everything in the morning, I’m drinking tea and watching her. It was cool. They take their webs down and build them again. I could get really close to the inside and watch it spin. For like years, I would sit in the summer and watch her. Spiders are fucking dope. Specifically this spider. And then once it was on my radar, I realized they’re all over Richmond, and people are scared as fuck of these. Like they’ll be in a doorway, and they’re like, ‘Fuck, a huge spider!’ Y’all, like leave it alone, that is a gentle creature. That is a cleaning up some nuisance animals situation.”

“This is the only tattoo artist that I actually ever dated, even though I used to hang out with others. And I dated him briefly, and he was a fucking clown. And he worked in a shop that wasn’t even my home shop or where I regularly hung out. He sometimes even slept there because he had a room in the back. I was in my early twenties. This man had tattoos on his penis. When I say this, people are always like, ‘What was it?!’ And I’m not going to tell you. But be assured, it is stupid.”

“It says, ‘To thy known self be true,’ and it says it in Latin. But there’s no real direct translation for that, because I got this translation from a woman who worked at the University of Utah who, bless her soul, answered my email and was like, ‘The fuck is this bitch doing?’ And basically was like, ‘That’s not how it works, there’s not like, here’s the closest we have to this.’ I know that it looks just like Semper Fi and I know that’s some Marine shit. I was under twenty-five when I got this.”

“These are also of the era,” Amy said of her feet tattoos. “I feel like if you made a line chart of the years, like if I had been five years older, the equivalent of this would have been like a rose tattoo on my boob. And I know several ladies who have that. Or a tribal arm band. I missed that, Pamela Anderson has that. She is older than me. And then later, kids would get the molecule or like the serotonin was a thing. This placement is incredible nineties.” She pointed to a piece tattooed on her upper thigh. “This placement is very now, this higher thigh.”

“Josh Stevens did this, kind of famous, unaffordable. It’s not his best work but I blame myself. It looks like an owl and it’s supposed to be a hawk. I told him before he did it that the beak was too small but he did not want to listen to me because he is an expert, so I have an owl. It’s fine.”

“From like eighteen to twenty-four, I got a bunch of tattoos. And then I chilled out for a while, and then we moved to Virginia and I didn’t know anybody. And that wasn’t what I was trying to do anyway. So a bunch of years passed, and then I got tattooed again. And I will keep getting more. I’m going to get a baby grand piano next, that my friend Kibbler drew, on the other side of my rib cage. It’s an ink drawing, it’s on the refrigerator.”

“When my head was shaved, I wish badly, badly, that I had tattooed my head. But I’m not going to shave it again to do that. But if I shave my head again, I will absolutely tattoo it. I will not miss that opportunity again. I super regret it. I would immediately grow the hair back and no one would ever see it, but I really wish I had done it.”

You can see part one of Amy’s tattoo story here. As always, thank you for reading, you’re beautiful.