Charlotte Sometimes

Tag: equality

  • Photography, Drow, Losing Jobs, Looking Stupid, and Being Cool

    First off – I’m not going to illustrate this post with any of my photographs. I don’t think it’s fair to do that for many of the things I’m discussing.

    Secondly – this is me speaking from my own experience and thoughts. Not as a representative of anyone I photograph or write for.

    When I first joined the LARP community, a few people gave me some helpful tips. Several of these revolved around the way that LARP is interpreted by the outside world. This advice was generally along the lines of:

    • The rest of the world thinks that LARP is stupid. It would be good if you tried to make LARP look cool, so that the rest of the world knows that we do is cool and not stupid.
    • LARP can cause people to worry about losing their jobs/friends because outsiders don’t understand what LARP is. If you could be sensitive to those people with your photographs then that would be cool.
    • Sometimes people outside of LARP misinterpret what we do. It would be cool if you could try to present an image to the rest of the world that shows we’re not just treading all over other peoples cultures.

    So lets get these points broken down.

    The rest of the world thinks that LARP is stupid.

    I tried to make LARP look cool. I think I managed. I often get told that my photographs feel cinematic and I hope that most people feel that way. I aim to make my photographs feel like a still from a film. It’s a different approach from most other photographers shooting LARP, but I feel like it works for me. It’s not to everyone’s taste, but I certainly feel like I make the hobby look cool. Even MattP said it:

    LRPs is developing in so many ways and there are many great games that don’t focus on the visual spectacle. But many of us are used to thinking of our hobby as something to be hidden away from ridicule – and in the 90s much of what we did looked pretty ridiculous. Mum’s old curtains, trainers, jeans, gaffa weapons and people shouting fireball. It was cool in our head, but we were painfully aware that to anyone watching it, it was as cool as two twenty-five year olds playing Mary and Joseph in the infant’s school nativity play.

    But LRP has come of age. It’s as fun as it ever was – but now it’s fucking cool.

    I get alot of people looking at my photographs who aren’t LARPers. I guess it’s because I write for photography magazines so people look me up on Facebook and they find my pictures. I guess I get on average two enquiries a week about what LARP is all about and how someone might go about playing. I don’t know what my conversion rate is, but I guess I’m actually quite high up in the rankings for the amount of people that stumble across LARP accidentally and enquire about it.

    You see, LARP does look cool. Even my Dad thinks that LARP looks cool and fancies a go at playing it. Actually he’s just amazed that you can get a whole weekend’s worth of entertainment – including potentially food and drink via bartering – for about £70 per person. But you know, whatever floats your boat.

    So when shown images of LARP that are good quality, people are interested in LARP. And they don’t think it’s stupid. They’re interested. Especially because of all the fantasy films that have come out in the last decade or two. LARP looks cool. Mostly.

    LARP can cause people to worry about losing their jobs/friends because outsiders don’t understand what LARP is.

    I generally don’t really think that this is a valid concern in most cases, however that’s because I’m quite happy to stand up for myself at work and tell my employer that they’re incorrect (I did that when it came to my poly relationship when I was called into HR once, they soon backed off). I would rather lose a job than work for a company that is narrow minded or even bigoted. However I understand that not everybody has that choice and sometimes people just have to toe the line at work, not discuss their personal life and hope that their employers don’t find out what they get up to at the weekends.

    The fact that people are concerned is enough for me. I might hold the opinion that your employer is a dickbag and you should look for another job, but I understand that you are frightened about being found out. Your concern is enough for me to also be concerned about the damage that my photographs can do to your life. Sure it irritates me when I have to take down a photo for these reasons – but my irritation isn’t at you, it’s at your dickbag employer.

    I learned very early on that takedown policies are really important to many LARPers. It’s important for many people to be able to say “Hey, I don’t like that photo for X, Y, or Z reason. Can you take it down please?” and I always oblige. I’m really proud of the fact that I’ve only been asked twice to remove pictures because someone thought they looked stupid. Twice in seventeen events. I’ve had a couple more for work related takedowns, but less than I can count on one hand. But anyway, that’s beside the point.

    Sometimes people outside of LARP misinterpret what we do.

    One of the problems with photographs of LARP is that they lack the context of the game. So when outsiders view my photographs – which they do, the stats on my pages clearly demonstrate this – they don’t understand the roleplay that is happening. Nor can they see your carefully crafted character background. An awful lot of the time they don’t even come from a background where they’ve ever read one of the fantasy novels that LARP has often grown out of. Come to think of it, nor have I.

    This means people looking at my photographs will be overlaying their own cultural context and making assumptions about what’s going on based on their own lived experiences. I can’t control who looks at my photographs, they’re accessible by anyone in the world who has an internet connection and access to Facebook or my website.

    Peoples lived experiences can really affect the way that they view certain classic LARP images. Like – dare I say it – Drow. If you’re in any way plugged in to the LARP community in the UK, you’ll have seen the fall-out on Facebook about the Drow/racism debate.

    The fact is, we can’t control who sees our photographs and how they interpret them. We also can’t control who comes to a LARP event smaller than a little local system, and you can’t control how they will react to various situations that they didn’t expect to see. It’s all well and good to expect military violence at a LARP – if you are a soldier suffering PTSD then perhaps an Airsoft LARP isn’t for you, for example – but why would you expect racism to be part of a fantasy LARP?

    I mean this is fantasy. This is supposed to be escapism from every day life. We went through all this when the UK LARP scene debated sexism in fantasy game settings. Lots of people (mostly white men, I’ll note) argued that they have to be ‘politically correct’ in their Monday-Friday lives, so why should they have to bother to be so during their escapism at the weekend? The answer was, quite clearly, because women want escapism from real life too. Including the sexism we have to endure frequently. Sorry bro, you don’t get to have your escapism if I don’t get to have mine too.

    To me, racism falls into the same camp. Lots of people find casual racism funny – plenty of people were admitting that openly on the UK LARP Facebook group. “Wait, are you saying we can’t make racist jokes anymore even if we’re not *actually* racist?” The answer to that question is, of course, No. And also you’re a dickweed. Bro. Because to be honest if you’re making racist jokes, you’re probably racist. You just don’t want to be called racist because that’s like, some kind of insult or something. In fact I’m going to post a quote here from an EverydayFeminism blog about political correctness that I really like:

    If you feel that you have to walk on eggshells to avoid being labeled a bigot, you might be in the habit of saying things that are bigoted.

     

    I mean, given that even KKK groups deny being racist, it’s entirely possible to do and say clearly oppressive things without seeing that they’re oppressive.

     

    So I’ll just say this: If the worst thing you could be called is sexist, racist, homophobic, a bigot, ableist, or the like, you have it pretty good.

    I’d like to write a few words specifically about this Drow business. I find this very difficult because I’m writing from a privileged position of being a white person, who grew up in a very white area, went to a predominantly white school, who has generally worked in quite white/European environments, and who is studying a very white course. I am loaded up on privilege here. But I’m trying not to be a dickweed about it. Mea culpa, I’m doing my best. Since part of my dissertation is discussing black theory in art history I’ve started to read up on it, but I’m not entirely there yet.

    I am ultra rational. I try to run everything through my logic filter and I try to view all situations the same way that I would those that I’ve actually experienced. I’ve never experienced racism. But I have experienced sexism and queer/homophobia, so I try my best to extrapolate those experiences onto racism issues and attempt to find some empathy with the affected groups.

    A few months ago I was reminded by a particular photograph (not one of mine) of a player at Empire who was wearing what appeared to be matte black makeup across their face. Nothing else done with it, just matte black, rubbed off around his lips where he’d clearly been wearing it a while (perhaps eating) and not covering the inside of the skin on his eyes just behind his eyelashes (you can run some eyeliner around that bit to stop it looking pink). I commented to my partner that for me it was uncomfortably close to historical blackface. He told me that it was just Drow inspired makeup and it’s very common in LARP to wear black makeup. I looked into the history of the Drow and the historical myths and legends that inspired them and it did little to put my mind at rest. This bothered me. Then I looked through my photographs and realised I’d never published any photographs of this person even though I’d taken a few decent ones. It had apparently always made me uncomfortable.

    A couple of weeks ago I started to sit down and try to articulate to myself why. The answer was that many Drow at LARP look really quite close to historical blackface makeup – especially once they’ve been wearing the makeup for a few hours at an event.

    Institutional white favouritism harms us all. And silence and complicity in the status quo is as bad as being openly racist. Just as with sexism, if you do not speak up about injustices then you are part of the problem. Simply not being aware of how your hobbies actions could be interpreted by outsiders can also be part of the problem.

    There’s a cost/benefit discussion to be had about black makeup to represent Drow. The benefit to black makeup in LARP seems to step from the fact that some Dungeons & Dragons literature portrayed Drow as having ‘inky’ black skin (you know, that black skinned race from a different (underground) part of the world who are all inherently evil… *sigh*). Go back to the faerietales that the Drow seem to be drawn from though and there don’t seem to be much races. So I don’t really consider it much of a benefit to be slavishly sticking to a look promoted by an author somewhere in the mid-70s. The cost is that many outsiders (and insiders) find it to be quite similar to the very racist blackface.

    What’s the solution though? The obvious solution to me seems to be for future games (and perhaps current games too) to encourage players to use a different colour makeup to represent evil races from unknown parts of the world. Perhaps purple would be cool, for example. It doesn’t seem like much of a change to buy a set of purple elf ears and a pot of purple makeup. Less than £30 in all. I spent than on a pair of LARP trousers the other week and my trousers weren’t problematic for anyone at all.

     

    I’ve had quite a few discussions over the past 24 hours with persons of colour (POC) and many said that they personally found blackface to be quite triggering – reminding them of past racism directed at them. You have to remember that although Britain is painted as a multicultural society, in most places it isn’t as multicultural as we might like to think. I think that in my year at school – 160 girls – there was only one or two POC. I didn’t grow up in a town where POC were an everyday part of my life. It wasn’t until I started working in London (Camden, in fact) when I was about 25 that I even really got to known any POC. I did have some profound experiences though as an outdoor pursuits instructor when I was 21 – we primarily taught school groups from inner city London schools (predominantly made up of children who were POC) and youth offenders who also had a high percentage of POC. Talking to these young people was sobering and changed my outlook on the battles that many of them were having to fight on a daily basis – and it made me profoundly consider my life as a very lucky white person – way before I’d even heard the term ‘privilege’. I enjoyed that job. I suspect that I learned as much from the people I taught as they learned from me.

    There’s one thing that bothered me though during the discussions on UK LARP. As a white woman, I’ve always been told to let POC speak up on their own issues. It’s a sentiment I completely agree with. However what do you do when you believe that someone with lived experiences are not the correct way forward? It’s very difficult to negotiate that path.

    The topic of colour-blindness came up. The idea that we shouldn’t be bothered by black drow makeup because we now live in a society that should be striving to be colour-blind. (I.e. we should pretend that someones race does not exist and treat everyone identically.) I’m not actually ok with that approach. If we pretend that someone isn’t a POC then we ignore their lived experience. Many POC will have a different world view to me due to the fact that they have endured challenges that I have not and many of those challenges will be directly related to the colour of their skin. To pretend that someone doesn’t have different colour skin is to say that we have all had the same experience in life. We have not.

    For that reason I don’t agree with aiming for gender-blind society either at this point in time. I have lived my life as a woman. If you ignore the fact that I am a woman and you treat me like everyone else (or more likely – you treat me as societies default which is most likely ‘white male’) then you are ignoring my struggle and my experiences as a woman. And boy, there have been some struggles. Gender still matters. Race still matters. Sexuality still matters. Because we have all lived our life differently due to those things that make us different from each other.

    Can’t we just all get along?

    Well yes, that is the goal. I assume it’s the goal for most LARPers anyway. But in order to all get along we have to acknowledge what makes us different. That could be checking in on someones personal pronoun, that could be deciding not to play a misogynistic character, that could be not making rape jokes in the bar, it could even be deciding that your Drow is going to be dark purple instead of black. These things might feel like tokenistic gestures sometimes, but they’re part of saying to new people and outsiders ‘I want you to feel welcome in my hobby’.

    Because like it or not, LARP is still dominated by straight, white dudes who are into science-stuff. The rest of us really still are a minority at most games here in the UK. If we want new people to come into the hobby – who don’t come at it from a strict fantasy/D&D point of view – then we need to consider how our actions might be interpreted by people both inside and outside of the hobby. And most of these people will be going on visual clues to form their initial opinions – like photographs.

    And there’s only so much I can do with a photograph of you wearing what appears to be blackface. It’s very hard to make you not seem like a racist dickbag. I can’t post your character background next to each shot.

  • Why critising Page 3 is not just about stopping men looking at tits

    TW: Rape

    In the wake of the news(!) that Page 3 will now show women in bras instead of half naked, I’d like to address some concerns that I have seen posted on my social media feed, amongst other places.

    Here we go…

    Last week you were all “Je suis Charlié” in defence of freedom of speech/expression. Now you’re advocating censorship coz boobs?

    It might seem like semantics, but nobody is calling for the censorship of boobs. Or not that I’ve seen anyway. What the people who are criticising Page 3 are largely saying is ‘Hey, we don’t think that some mass media outlets treat women with the same respect as men. We’d really like it if you did. Could you think about doing that please?’

    It’s not just women objectified by the sun. How come every guy athlete is photographed in shorts and stripped to the waist?

    I’d like to say that this is a fair point, but it’s not. When guy athletes strip to the waist they do it because they’re hot and they want to take their shirt off to cool down. The editors of the paper don’t put these images in because their readership find them sexy and arousing, they put them in because that is considered the normal behaviour of a sportsman. Well, a footballer. You don’t see many skiers stripping to the waist after having a good run. Not to mention that shorts are the standard uniform of most land sports. You think the photographers are going to run onto the pitch as a striker kicks the ball at a goal and asking him to put some joggers on? Didn’t think so.

    Instead of asking why guy athletes are photographed in shorts and no shirts, perhaps we could instead why women never make it into the sports pages of Red Top newspapers? Or newspapers in general really, unless there’s an Olympic Games on. The fact that women’s sports are not considered good enough to report on in the newspapers (i.e. women’s sports are not news) is a symptom of the problem that goes hand in hand with the glamour models on Page 3 and the paparazzi reporting. All reinforce the idea that if a woman wants to get into the newspaper she needs to look great and show some skin. There’s no point in her being brilliant and successful in any other way.

    Don’t like it, don’t buy it.

    You know what? I totally agree with you. But I’d also like to make you aware that you can be exposed to the sexist attitudes that it helps to reinforce even if you don’t buy it. Lucy-Anny Holmes covered this much better than I could in her piece for the Huffington Post. I’d like to highlight a few points though:

    The school girl, who wrote to the Everyday Sexism project saying that the boys in her school hold up Page Three in the corridor and mark the girls out of 10 as they walk past, doesn’t buy it.

    The woman who sits in a staff room everyday while a male colleague shows Page Three to all the men with the words ‘would you do that?’ doesn’t buy it.

    The father who felt outraged that a man was looking at Page Three while his three-and-a-half year-old daughter was having a hair cut, didn’t buy it.

    When Clare Short stood up in the 80s and spoke out about these pictures being in the paper, she received 1000s of letters of support. Twelve were from women who had Page Three mentioned to them while they were being raped. These women didn’t buy it.

    The boobs in page 3 are there soley for viewing pleasure and no model who poses for page 3 is under any other illusions.

    No, you’re quite right. But if we’re going to play the ‘these women are up for it’ card, then perhaps at least we could briefly pause to consider how now all glamour models actually want to work as glamour models. Some are forced into it because it can be hard for young women to find work in our society (caused by sexist notions that are reinforced by this kind of imbalanced journalism). Some are forced into it as part of being in the sex trade. Some are forced into it as being part of a trafficked sex slave. Some are forced into it because education has failed them.

    It’s true that many glamour models are brilliant, bright, intelligent women who are aware of the cultural arguments surrounding their choice to be a model – I was not one of those women. I worked as a glamour model to try and somehow get approval for my body. I felt I was liberated, but I actually really wasn’t. And that’s why lots of former Page 3 models speak out about Page 3. Because at 18 (or younger) how can we expect a young woman to make such huge decisions concerning her future? I’m not saying that 18 year old women aren’t capable of making good decisions, but certainly I think it’s very young to have enough relevant life experience in our sexist society to understand the full implication of their choices. The industry systematically takes advantage of the naivety of many of these women, and that’s not very pleasant at all.

    To suggest page 3 breeds acceptance of objectification is the same as suggesting video games normalises gratuitous violence in teenagers & kids.

    Except video games are fiction. The systematic sexist treatment of women in some mass media is real. You can’t compare real life with fiction.

    I appreciate that video games also have a high degree of misogyny in many titles, but this is something that many of us are also working towards. If you disagree that this kind of behaviour should be normalised I’d love to have you on board with our work.

    Your right to be offended should never trump my right to be offensive.

    No, but perhaps the right of 51% of the population to not be treated disrespectfully trumps the ‘right’ of a few guys to look at porn with their cornflakes? Or on the bus? Or in the staff room? Or at the hairdressers?

    I don’t buy this “I’m offended because women are objectified” argument. If people truly feel that way, campaign against makeup, fashion designers who make tight fitting clothing, shoe companies who make high heels.

    I feel like this is somewhat of a spurious argument, but I’m going to do my best. I’m not against men or women wearing makeup or tight fitting clothing. What I’m against is the fact that some mass media outlets perpetuate and promote the idea that women are only worth anything if they conform to a particular stereotype and take their clothes off. If people want to wear things that make them feel great, then I’m all for that. But that’s not the same as presenting a half-naked, primped women as ‘news’.

    The human race objectifies people hundreds of times an hour as we walk down the street, whether it’s turning your head for a second look or crossing the road to avoid.

    Objectification: treating a person as a thing.

    I don’t know about you, but I don’t treat people as things if I can help it at all. Crossing the road to avoid someone because you perceive a negative stereotype isn’t objectification. Having a second look at someone because they’re hot might be objectification due to cultural context.

    But the important thing is how you act on that. If you objectify people inside your own brain and you don’t make any external actions, then I guess that’s ok. It’s your call how you work your grey matter. However systematic objectification of women throughout a newspaper in a way that affects many, many people is not ok. I think there is a pretty big difference between those things.

    For if you censor then where does it stop? Transgendered people using a bathroom they were not born to? Muslims being offended at the cartoons of the Prophet Mohammed? Women sunbathing topless on family beaches?

    1. Once again, there’s no call for censorship. There is a call for mass media outlets to treat women with the same respect as men.

    2. Transgender people use whichever bathroom is relevant to their status. I’m trying to think of a polite way to put this, but their ‘birth sex’ is none of your fucking business.

    3. Everyone has a right to be offended. That’s ok. To be offended means resentful or annoyed due to a perceived insult. It’s natural human reaction to being insulted. I think the Pope made a fair point on this the other day – if you talk trash about my mother, that’s going to make me pissed. It’s how you act on those impulses that sets you apart as a person.

    4. Where did women sunbathing on a beach come into it? Oh, I see. You think that those of us who think that women should be treated respectfully in the newspapers believe that tits are bad? I’ll tell my girlfriend. I’m sure she’ll find it hilarious.

    The women in the pictures are very well paid models who know what they are doing, I’d have thought a feminist or a male apologist would be campaigning for the right for them to show naked breasts, not cover them up.

    Just to set the record straight, posing for Page 3 isn’t generally that well paid. Not considering the amount of work that goes into it and the fact it basically devastates your ability to do many careers in the future. Your average (non famous) glamour model is probably doing well if they’re making £15k a year. I mean, they’re probably doing really well. Not so great really, is it? You could get paid more stacking shelves in supermarkets.

    You say male apologist like it’s a bad thing for men to support equality for women.

    However I absolutely campaign for the right for women to show naked breasts. I mean, I was there a few years ago handing out leaflets on a demonstration that said women should have equal rights of men to take their shirts off in the street. And I think that absolutely we should be able to model nude if we choose to. I think that the nude body is a wonderful thing and it’s great to use it to make art (or porn, I like porn too). What I don’t like is the fact that some media outlets choose to treat women with less respect than men. (I feel like a broken record now.)

    And lastly when you say it’s about access, show me someone under the age of 18 who actually buys a newspaper.

    Actually I’d like to suggest that lots of young people – mostly young teenage boys – probably buy newspapers like this to see the soft porn. Certainly they did when I was at school, and that wasn’t actually that long ago. Because if you’re underage you might not be able to get round the porn filters on your smartphone, without an adult putting their credit card details over the phone, or without you going into a phone shop and convincing them that you’re an adult.

    But you know, Tesco didn’t just put some tabloid papers behind screens for no reason. They felt it was right right thing to do. To stop young people seeing overtly sexualised pictures of models (and celebrities) at eye level. I can’t see why anyone would think it is a good idea to instil in young peoples minds that overt sexualisation of women is natural, normal or a good thing. Perhaps we can encourage this generation to grow up with a far more egalitarian outlook if we stop ramming the message that women should be sexualised down their throats.

    This “I don’t want boobs in my news” is ridiculous because I’m betting that no-one who is for the removal of page 3 actually buys and reads The Sun.

    I don’t see how this is a relevant argument. I don’t buy battery farmed eggs and yet I still campaign for the removal of battery hen farms.

    So it’s about censorship and removing some else’s access to something.

    As was previously pointed out, it’s not about censorship it’s about calling for respect. And any adult who wants to look at soft porn can do so any time they wish on their mobile phone. There is no reason for it to be in a newspaper.

    I think this is also a great place to leave this video. Again.

     

  • Positive discrimination in photos

    Positive discrimination in photos

    OR: IS IT REALLY ANY OF MY BUSINESS?

    So I have this problem. I don’t believe in positive discrimination.

    I don’t think that positively discriminating in most situations is the correct way to promote tolerance, understanding and ultimately equality. In feminism in particular I do not believe that the way to force equality to happen is by doing things like setting quotas for the number of employees, for example. It just breeds resentment and prevents the best people from getting the job, if the best person happens to be male. This is a little besides the point, but I’d like to set out my stall as to where I’m coming from. I don’t believe that positive discrimination is a good thing. If I got a job due to positive discrimination, for example, I’d never feel comfortable in my role and I’d feel pretty uncomfortable as a person.

    Dove-Real-Beauty-CampaignHere’s a great example of an utterly bizarre form of positive discrimination by Dove as part of their Real Beauty campaign. The campaign said that ‘all’ women are beautiful. And yet the campaign only shows a certain type of woman in their underwear. Yes, they seem to have hit the ‘racial discrimination’ quota, but ALL of the women appear to be something around a size 12, with a tummy and a decent pair of norks. None of the women appear to be underweight, overweight, muscular, disabled or transgender. In addition they all have shoulder length hair and perfect teeth. Did you notice that?

    As someone who is short, on the muscular side, size 6-8 with a bald head and bad teeth, I’m starting to feel pretty worthless about now. Because ALL women can be beautiful, as long as they fit what Dove tells us is beautiful.

    That’s the problem with positive discrimination, you start to leave people out. You can talk about how we should be completely egalitarian, inclusive and diverse, but where do you stop when you’re fundamentally talking about creating an image with only so many pixels to use?

    I come from a weird place with my photography, a place where standards of beauty and what’s ‘right’ gets twisted. In a previous iteration I was a full time fashion photographer, working in studios with some of the top commercial models in the country. This picture below, the girl at the far end in the white jeans? That was my stylist. And I’m standing next to her in the grey leggings. I can pick out at least five or six models from this line up who we regularly had in the studio.

    Hollister and Gilly Hicks pre-opening promotional event 4In fact this guy below, we regularly had him in the studio. (He was such a sweetie.)

    4360351805_aeba370978_bSo why am I posting these picture of hot guys? Because I want you to understand where I come from with my photography. This was my world, until I gave it up. Judging people against impossibly high standards of beauty was what I did. I’m not saying this was nice, or that looking back I particularly enjoyed it, but it’s part of what shaped me and my photography and it’s where I come from.

    What is it that they say? You cannot change your past but you can change your future.

    However.

    Recently I became aware of something interesting. When I meet a person socially I don’t make judgements against them. I don’t think in my head ‘this person is black’ or ‘this person can’t walk properly’ or ‘this person is overweight’.

     I’m going to stop here for a moment and say something. My interest is in feminist academia. I campaign and write about other -isms when they intersect with feminism. I have limited knowledge in this field so I’m probably going to express myself wrongly here. I also have lots of friends who call themselves by nicknames related to their skin colour, sexuality or disabilities and so sometimes I genuinely have not realised that a word was ‘wrong’ to use, because my friends use it to describe themselves. In fact I think the word disability is probably wrong, but I don’t know the right word to use. So mea culpa – I beg forgiveness before I start.

    If you asked me how many black friends I had, I’d struggle to know. Same with gay friends or disabled friends. I just have friends and to be honest their backgrounds, ethnicities, sexualities or not-quite-working-right-bits are all as interesting to me as any other friend. Each person has their own story to tell, which they tell on it’s merits rather than because they are a certain type of minority.

    I just see people as people. I’m not particularly interested in their gender, ethnicity or health status (that might be because I’m a misanthrope and not that interested in people in general an awful lot of the time – at least I’m honest). But apparently most people don’t think this way. Apparently most people do notice these things right off the bat. And apparently most people judge.

    Well lets be honest, I know most people judge, as someone who generally presents as female I experience this all the time. And because I have experienced this judgement in my life, I try not to apply that to other people.

    I’ve got to the point in the blog post where I realise I’m wandering off track and I say ‘where am I going with this?’

    So where am I going with this.

    I suppose what I’m trying to talk about is the fact that when you take a photograph as a creative exercise rather than a purely documentary work, you’re making aesthetic decisions. In fact I’d go one step further in that in pure documentary photography you’re also making aesthetic decisions – it’s just that they might be governed by a slightly different set of ideals.

    Creative photography is almost exclusively about aesthetics. Ultimately you select images on if you think they look good to your eye or that they tell the story that you, as a photographer, are trying to tell. Every photographer has different things that they look for in a creative image and indeed those things can change from client to client and job to job.

    So LRP photography for me is governed by a particular set of creative ideas. Now, it would be presumptuous to talk about the motivations of photographers who aren’t me and I know that my photography comrades from Empire – Ollie and Tom – both have wildly different ideas about what makes a great LRP photograph both to myself and to each other. But I think that’s what makes us a good team, you know? Because we’re actively looking for different things in our work and therefore you get three very different takes on the same subject.

    So I will admit that what I do, considering my background in photography and my journey so far, is that I judge people on the way that they look when I’m including them in my photographs. HOWEVER. And this is a massive HOWEVER. I do not judge someone based on how ‘beautiful’ society thinks they are, their ethnicity, their sexuality, their gender status or their bodies ability to function.

    What I judge someone on when I photograph them either as a model or at a LRP event is how appropriate they look in the settings. So for example when it comes to LRP I particularly love the look of the old, weathered Marches who look like they’ve seen dozens of harvests on their farms. Sure, I’m judging them as beautiful, but beautiful relative to the situation and the setting. I hope he’ll forgive me for saying I think he looks weathered, but this is one of my favourite shots so far from Empire:

    _MG_4656web

    Why is it a favourite shot? Because the whole thing just comes together. A senior member of a Marches family fighting to defend the Empire in worn, old costume that looks like it’s seen a hundred fights – it’s perfect!

    So when I say I’m judging based on aesthetics, this is what I mean. I’m not judging on what society believes is attractive, I’m judging based on what I believe looks good in a particular setting.

    And yeah, it’s what I believe looks good. Because I’m the one behind the camera. And because I’m the one putting in extensive amounts of work to make this happen, so that I can produce a portfolio that I adore looking at.

    You see, I do photography to make me happy. I don’t do photography to make other people happy. Of course it is always flattering to find out that people love my photographs or that they’ve given people self confidence or that they just enjoy having them as a record of a place that they have been, but fundamentally I take photographs because I love taking photographs. In fact I quit my job working in fashion because taking photographs for other people was no longer fun.

    Working with Matt and PD on events was an interesting challenge to me. It was a chance to attempt to make photography fun for me again, because I hadn’t picked up my camera in almost a year. I felt I had skills that I had learnt in the commercial world that I could apply to PD and I also though it was a great opportunity to use it almost like a sandbox for trying out new techniques and approaches. In that way it’s worked extraordinarily well, I think. Certainly from my end I’ve had loads of opportunities to try out new processing methods, new looks, new retouching techniques, all sorts of things.

    But something that’s really important to remember about all the crew at a LRP event, is that they’re doing it for fun and they’re doing it because they enjoy it. If it starts to stop being fun then they’re under absolutely no obligation to continue doing it. I suspect at some point in my future LRP photography will stop being fun, however if that’s six weeks away or two decades away – who knows. An awful of my ‘fun’ that is generated at events comes from the people I surround myself rather than the actual taking of photographs. I have wonderful friends and I enjoy the fact that my photography hobby allows me to spend time with them in this way.

     

    So there’s a point in here somewhere. I suspect as usual it will happen at around the 2000 word mark.

    There have been mutterings recently that perhaps the ‘official’ photographer for a LRP event should be held to certain standards of inclusivity and diversity and I’d like to give my thoughts on this topic pertaining to my own photography. Before we go any further together I want to say that I am not an official mouthpiece for any publications or organisations that I am associated with. ‘Official’ statements will always be given out through official channels. This blog is not an official channel.

    I’m not interested in knowing where strangers are from, their backgrounds, their gender status, their visible disabilities or any invisible illnesses that they might have.

    I’m interested in those things in my friends. And actually, I’m a nosy bitch and I am interested in those things in strangers. (Once again mea culpa – I take after my grandmother who was so nosey she once fell backwards off a chair in a bar in Mexico because she was leaning so far back to hear the conversation of two strangers behind her. She might have had gin.) But I feel it’s not my place to know those things about strangers, because I wouldn’t be happy with random strangers who happen to own a camera knowing such personal things about me.

    But say I was happy to try and implement a ruling about hitting quotas of images to use in my portfolio, the advertising for the system and the wiki. The first problem is that I have no clue how many people on the field are a minority of some kind. So we’d have to make them fill out a survey or something which is invasive and is never going to be considered a good thing. I remember when I was studying with the Open University and they sent out a survey asking our ethnicities, sexualities and disabilities so that they could ensure that they were meeting government set targets – absolute outrage ensued. People don’t like being asked this when they perceive it’s not for a good reason. So that’s the first hurdle.

    Then there is of course the issue of matching those surveys to people on the field. Unless you’re in my close social group at events, I don’t know your name. You might have messaged me on Facebook but I still almost certainly won’t know what you look like. It’s unlikely I will have put name and picture together, unless you’re using one of my pictures as your Facebook avatar. And even then, I still am unlikely to remember who you are when you come up and talk to me in a field. I just seem to have been born lacking this skill of recognition. Of course what I’m not going to do is before I photograph someone check who they are and then check against my database. When it comes up ‘white, cis, British, middle-class male with no illness or disabilities’ should I not photograph him? Should I actively leave him out of my photographs even though he’s doing something that looks amazingly cool? If you start visually marking people with what minority they are, you’re getting into very uncomfortable areas with anti-Semitic providence. Which can never be a good thing.

    But this does bring up a very serious problem when you’re talking about diversity and equality in pictures. In a photograph you simply don’t know if someone is disabled, for example, unless they’re displaying disabled markers to the camera. So you can photograph someone in a wheelchair and say ‘I have photographed a person who looks disabled in my photograph’ (even though they might not actually be disabled, but just sitting in a wheelchair for some reason) but how do you know you’ve photographed someone with debilitating depression?

    And then to take that further with the transgender thing, should I be looking at people and saying ‘that man looks like a woman who is dressing as a man, I must photograph them’? Because actually for personal reasons, I’m not ok with that. I’m not ok with photographing people because of the fact that they were born in the wrong gender. Sure, I try to make sure that ‘women’ and ‘men’ are represented approximately equally in my photographs, but I don’t want to make judgement calls on if I think that woman used to be a man. Because actually, that’s really fucking out of order and unkind.

    By extension, what do I do if I realise that I have not captured enough of one particular minority during an event? We get to a point a bit like what the NHS do when they find that a hospital isn’t quite meeting waiting times for A&E – they create a separate emergency ward so that they can ‘admit’ people and therefore remove the problem from A&E. Do I spend a few hours chasing down that one Chinese woman who attended to ensure that I photograph her? I’m sure she’d feel great that I was hassling her purely because she has Chinese parents. What a compliment! The same with disabled people. Should I chase down the guy with ME just because he has ME and I’ve got to up my inclusion rate for invisible illnesses? I’m sure he’d be thrilled.

    This might all seem very extreme but honestly when you start to think about it, it’s really not. If you set quotas or targets then you have to meet quotas and targets otherwise they’re just worthless and you might as well not have bothered in the first place. Making policies for the sake of making policies is a waste of everyones time. And actually in the relentless pursual of an inclusive and diverse policy when it comes to taking photographs, quite frankly you’re going to deeply offend far more people than you make happy. Suddenly I would become the villain – again.

    So positive discrimination in photographs at a LRP event. Well, to be honest, I just don’t think I can go there for the reasons explained above. It’s not my job to offensively try to work out who I should take a photograph of and who I have taken too many of. I just want to take cool pictures of cool people doing cool things. And I just want to shoot to make myself happy.

    And I want to leave you with something that a friend just said to me during a conversation:

    I always like the thought that no one knows what your problems are from a picture. Its a place to hide and be ‘normal’ .

    My beautiful friend has severe M.E. And she doesn’t want to be singled out because of that in photographs.

  • On Women Photographers (and their rarity)

    I suspect that the low numbers of women practicing photography is very little to do with gadgetry and everything to do with culture and expectations.

    In the 1850’s or so, photography was actually quite commonly a womans hobby. The reason being, that once rich women had birthed their husbands children and told the maid what to do for the day, she had very little to do with her time other than look wistfully out the window while attending to her needlecraft samplers. Clearly, some women wished for a more interesting and adventurous hobby. Cue photography. There are some photographic historians who believe that at least 50% of photographers in the early days of photography were women, but this is hard to demonstrate because so little of the material is actually recorded in any meaningful way. We can find shoeboxes of photographs at any flea market full of photographs, but very few have any identifiable information on them. Some of the early leading and prominent art photographers were women though, and a fair bit is known about them.

    Over the decades that follow, it became more normal for even wealthy women to work. Families became less flush with the cash and dropped essential services such as maids and nannies. Women looked after the family, women did the household chores etc, more “upper class” families became considerably more “middle class”. This was particularly compounded by the Wars, which of course sent even more women out to work, because the men were away getting shot at, amongst other unpleasant things. When these men didn’t come home, the women obviously had to juggle working, rearing children and looking after the house – leaving very little free time for anything resembling a hobby.

    As we went though the 1940’s and the 1950’s, there was an uncomfortable air of division between men and women. On the whole (at least my research shows) women often worked, ran the houses and looked after the children. You think this left spare time for fun? Men were free to take up their own pastimes. Photography was having a bit of a golden age at the time, with cameras coming down in cost and developing becoming much more accessible at time. Attitudes at the time too, were that science and art was something that was mans work, something a little lady couldn’t possibly get her head around. Why this change of ideas from the Victorian era and before? Who knows, but I’m researching it.

    As my Grandmother puts it, the 40’s and 50’s were a “dark time” for many women. They struggled to find their own identify in a changing world. For women spending their formative years in this decade, a hobby is something that they generally didn’t have. Yes, there are exceptions to the rule, but pastimes were something best done when the housework was in bed and the children were asleep. How much photography can you really do while you’re checking on the kids every half an hour? On the contrary this was a time of clubs and societies for men. Photographic societies were booming again, populated largely by men looking to get out the house and spend time enjoying themselves.

    You didn’t really start seeing more freedom and equality for women until you start looking at those born in the late 50’s onwards. Growing up through the 60’s and 70’s passed on values of equality between the sexes. These women still weren’t generally encouraged by their parents to live a free and independent lives.  But crucially they were forming their own shared experiences as a generation, and they would pass those experiences onto the next generation.

    My generation. Born in the 80’s. Encouraged as a child to have a go at anything you want. No longer are there social barriers to entry for so many hobbies. No longer are women expected to only take up hobbies that can be fitted around their own domestic life, because quite frankly most of us women don’t have a “domestic life”. We are no longer expected to marry, settle down and have kids before we hit our mid twenties. That gives us YEARS of time to figure out what we enjoy doing. Plus at school everything is taught equally – and that has only been in force in the last twenty years – if that! Boys are taught cooking and girls are taught woodwork. No one says that we as girls can’t do anything just because we were born with a vagina instead of a penis.

    The world has wised up.

    Amongst photographers my own age, I know considerably more female photographers than male photographers. At least a 75%/25% split. I only know two or three female photographers above the age of 35, compared with dozens of male photographers.

    Plus of course, the cost of entry has been levelled. It has always been in the past, that women generally earned less than men. There is still a pay divide, but not on the same scale has it has been in the past. Plus as less women are choosing to have children, that means that women on the whole have more earning potential and more money. That means more money to buy the gadgets that we lust.

    Society is changing considerably. We are the first generation of women that has truly found it’s voice – thanks to our parents. We are the first generation who can do anything we want to do, without feeling male dominance breathing down our neck.

    And it’s fabulous.

  • Women are more beautiful than men

     

    Really?  Are they?  Someone must have forgotten to send me the memo.

    Whenever the subject is brought up in various guises about why there is less sexually enticing imagery around of men the same old cries are heard “It’s because women are more beautiful than men!”  The reasons seem to range from the naive to the idiotic.  I’ve heard that women are more beautiful because they have curves for example.  I mean, what the hell?  That’s like saying that a Ferrari 599 GTO is better than a Ferrari F40 because it’s got curves.  Just no.  Besides men have curves, they’re just in different places.

    It’s generally accepted in todays modern world that men are the ones who spend time lusting after women, while women want to have their “emotional” and “sensitive” needs met.  Newsflash guys, I’m afraid we women have those same physical needs that you do.  We like looking at men, it gets us a little hot and bothered under the collar in the same way that it does for guys.  Why do you think the Diet Coke adverts were so successful over the years?  It’s because they rang true to just about every woman I know!

    Anyway.  I feel sad for anyone in this modern world who cannot appreciate beauty because of an arbitrary piece of equipment attached (or missing) between the subjects legs.  It seems so sad not be able to find beauty in 50% of the human population just because you’re so culturally conditioned to believe that you couldn’t possibly look at someone the same sex and appreciate that they look good.

    Seeing that someone looks good, or is beautiful is a completely different thing to being attracted to them.  Why can people not fathom this?

    I look forward to a time when men in this world will be able to look at another man and see beauty and attractiveness, even if he is not sexually attracted to the subject.  But until society changes it’s attitudes about being gay, this will never happen.  In our modern world men positively encourage lesbianism, but fear homosexuality between men.  (It’s ok guys, don’t worry, you can’t catch gay!)

    I fear that these attitudes will not change within my lifetime.

     

  • Page 3

     

    Page 3 is outdated and sexist.

    There.  I said it.  Lots of people frequently suggest that it’s just a piece of harmless titillation.  I agree, it is harmless titillation, I don’t see any problem with glamour photography at all (in fact, I shoot glamour myself, it’s my favourite genre).

    The problem is, that Page 3 is all a bit one sided.  It’s always one or two girls (white, size 8 and “healthy” looking), baring their boobs with some rubbish babble about how they like doing it in bed.  Where are the guys?  And if we can’t have guys on that page 50% of the time, how about we just get rid of it all together?

    The thing is, those who say it’s harmless fun are mostly guys.  Think about this scenario gents:  You’re sitting on the train on the way to work, minding your own business.  A woman sits down next to you and opens her reading material, only to spend most of the journey studying a naked version of her perfection.  That’s right, she’s sitting next to you eyeing up fit naked blokes (sometimes two of them embracing if she’s really lucky and they’re running a special).  How would you feel?  Intimidated?  I bet you’d feel a bit intimidated if some chick was sitting next to you looking at pictures of naked blokes.

    How do I know you’d feel like this?  Because someone said it to me a while back on the train.  I was sitting working on my iPad, minding my own business and replying to some emails from potential models.  I was selecting images and sending them over to them to provide inspiration.  No one sat next to me, until I was almost the last seat on the carriage.  Then one guy sat down nervously and after a few minutes said “Do you mind not looking at that kind of thing please?”.  The thing is, normally I would have been more embarrassed than him, I hate to think that I would make someone feel uncomfortable.  Until I noticed a copy of The Sun under his arm, which included all the usual Page 3 junk.  I decided to ignore his request.

    So guys, before you continue to support Page 3 and everything it stands for, ask yourself this.  How would you feel if the newspapers in question ran shots of hot naked blokes on Page 2?  Would you mind if the girl (or guy) on the train next to you sat there for the duration of your journey gawping at some guys cock?