aqueerkettleofish:queerdo-mcjewface: gallusrostromegalus: See I’ve seen like 600 variations of
aqueerkettleofish:queerdo-mcjewface: gallusrostromegalus: See I’ve seen like 600 variations of this meme and I gotta tell you a Story. The year is 2012. It’s Christmas. It’s the first year my sister and I are both home from college, and we’re feeling kind of nostalgic, so we take out the old family photo albums to remember everyone from times past. We’re all on the couch or the floor with hot chocolate and the Dog is curled up under the tree. It’s all very Norman Rockwell. We’re going through my Mom’s side of the family, laughing at the pictures of Grandma putting wrapping paper on the dog, and grandpa pulling faces at the camera, when we find an old brown envelope. “The fuck? says my sister, because she’s been in to Great-Aunt Liz’s Rumballs, and I open the envelope. Inside are four tickets to the titanic, unused, and Mom tells us the story of how her ancestors ALMOST came over on the Titanic, but Great-Aunt Liz got the measles and forced everyone into quarantine, thus saving their lives. The OTHER thing in the envelope are seven Photographs, dated 1890. They are of my Great-Great Grandmother. They are nudes. They are NOT tasteful nudes. Like, these are Violating-Terms-Of-Service-On-Most-Platforms- OBSCENE. GGG had these taken waaaaay back in ye olden days, in order to convince her wayward husband to move back to England after he ditched her to party it up in Chicago. I CANNOT TELL YOU HOW FUCKING HARD WE LAUGHED. Like, I think I passed out I was laughing so hard. So yes, people have ALWAYS been like this, and your nudes will make for a hilarious family Christmas someday. I’m trying to figure out the logistics of 19th century nudes. Did she hire someone to take and develop the photos? As a photographer, I can confirm that, yes, she did. Or she was friends with a photographer. In the days before digital photography caught on, if you had a darkroom and a reputation for discretion, women would come to you to develop their film or take the actual pictures. And, let me tell ya, when a woman shows up and says “take pictures of me naked”, most people who are sexually attracted to women say “Sure!”I’m pretty sure I’ve replied to this post before, but I am doing it again suddenly confronted with a Random Memory.There was a movie called “Punch Line”, starring Tom Hanks as a comedian (and Sally Field as a housewife learning to be a comedian). At one point, Tom Hanks is being heckled on stage, and he asks the guy “Hey, do you have any naked pictures of your girlfriend? No? Would you like to buy some?” And for a (thankfully short) period of time, this entered popular culture as a thing guys said to degrade other men.At this particular point in time, I was male-passing enough that nobody (even me) questioned it, but not perfectly male-passing, so I was the kind of person guys would build themselves up by tearing down. That’s how I found myself having the following conversation:“Hey, man, you got any pictures of your girlfriend naked?”“Yeah.”“Would you – wait, what?”“Yes, I have pictures of my girlfriend naked.”“Bullshit.”“I’m a photographer. Wait a second. Aren’t you Kevin?”“…yes.”“I have photos of your girlfriend naked.” (To be clear, I wasn’t outing her. She had the photos on the wall of her apartment and had given copies to practically everyone she knew.) The last time I responded to this post, I think I did a bit about how the women I photographed in the 90s are now approaching 50 and are glad they did it. But there’s another point.In the 1990s, I probably took photos of a hundred different women in varying stages of undress. And the thing that would surprise you most is who those women were. Yes, there were the exhibitionists like Kevin’s girlfriend, and yes, some of these were the girls who were known with sleeping with everyone. But… also, like, just… women. I was not the only photographer who had two portfolios– one I could show to anyone, and one that I had to sift through before showing it to a given person because I was allowed to use them only if I was showing them to people who didn’t know them. (And a whole mess of photos I wasn’t allowed to show ANYONE because they were just for the model and/or her partner.) And, I must stress, this was the 1990s, when naked selfies required either risking a photomat (where they would be in the hands of a complete stranger who could make copies easily) or talking to someone like me. The advent of digital photography did not cause women to lose modesty. It just made it easier for them to control their own sexual expression. -- source link
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