These images remind me of this article, titled “Graphic Artist Carefully Assigns Ethnicities to Anthropomorphic Recyclables,” from The Onion.
Photos like this (under Day Four, Evacuation, photo 2), in which another photographer is visible, make me wonder if people from the media are helping individuals in addition to reporting.
Back to the photo on the New York Times’ front page. It reminded me of photos the newspaper published of people falling from the top of the World Trade Center on 9/11. Or the picture of a dead Marine being dragged through the streets of Somalia. An ethics class that I took first semester took time to discuss the ethics of publishing provocative photos. Is it ethical if a person in distress or a corpse is identifiable in a photo? What if a person isn’t identifiable? Should such a photo run on the front page or inside the paper?
I don’t remember if the photos of people falling from the World Trade Center ran on the front page of the New York Times, but I’m a little shocked that they went with the photo that they did today. I know a lot of people have drowned in the flood, but I think this picture shouldn’t have been featured so prominently in the paper because the corpse is so visible. (The Los Angeles Times published a photo on its Web site in which a floating corpse, which one might be able to identify because of the woman’s clothing, is even more visible. I feel guilty for not being able to look away from the picture.)
I thought today’s discussion of race and Hurricane Katrina on the Brian Lehrer Show was interesting. You can listen to a stream of it or download it. The segment is called “Like Being in Steerage in the Titanic?”
I just heard a discussion with Leonard Pitts, Jr., who wrote the editorial “Katrina’s Eye Was Colorblind” in today’s issue of the Detroit Free Press.
Over the years, I’d heard bits and pieces about the Suicide Girls. I’d seen an ad for a touring burlesque show involving Suicide Girls, but otherwise they had infiltrated popular (punk) culture without my fully knowing who or what they were.
Then I came across an article about an alternative porn Web site, and the writer — or maybe someone she interviewed for the article — took a swipe at the Suicide Girls, claiming that this Web site, unlike the Suicide Girls’, would be truly inclusive. Probably because I trust skepticism more than I do enthusiasm, I decided to find out who the Suicide Girls were exactly.
What I found out is that the Suicide Girls are “pin-up punk rock and goth girls,” in a nutshell. Women audition to be Suicide Girls, and if they are accepted, they are paid to have their photos taken, photos which are then posted online and accessible to paying members. The Suicide Girls Web site also includes interviews with celebrities, forums and groups, and the Suicide Girls’ online journals. Suicide Girls have a say in how they want to pose in their pictures, and many use their celebrity to focus attention on creative projects they might be involved in.
My problem with the concept of the Suicide Girls is that, other than the fact that the women have tattoos, piercings and dyed hair, they do not really challenge accepted ideals of beauty in our society, i.e., big eyes, oval faces, narrow noses, white.
I did a Google search and found one girl had written in her blog about how it’s a relief to see a photo of a Suicide Girl with small breasts, as she has small breasts herself. So the Suicide Girls might not be busty blonds. But take a look at mainstream media, and I think one will find plenty of models and actresses with small breasts.
I think what would be really radical would be taking an overweight woman — or one with big hips and small breasts, or a woman of whatever figure is not already portrayed as attractive in the media — and presenting her as an object of desire.
Writer Annie Tomlin makes a more eloquent argument than I do here in her article “Sex, Dreads, and Rock ‘n’ Roll.” She writes, “Imagine giving the varsity cheerleading squad makeovers at Hot Topic, and you wouldn’t be too far off. Most of the models here (and on other indie-porn sites, too) are thin, white, and traditionally beautiful. … It’s not that punk and indie scenes are devoid of these women [women who are not thin, white, and traditionally beautiful], so their apparent exclusion from the site suggests that Suicide Girls and others aren’t seeing the alternatives in ‘alternative.’”
