Tuesday, April 19, 2016

Inspired by the 1920s

I never really know where my research and searches will take me next, but then I found the beautiful and sexy photographs of beautiful and stunning women of the 1920s. Given my love of cinema and theater, when I found Alfred Cheney Johnston's portraits of the Ziegfeld Follies girls, I felt I discovered a refreshing female “prettiness”, and was so inspired. Given my fascination with medieval history and post apocalypse theories, we get this body of work. I found I was also jealous of those 20's ladies, because they were so brave and revolutionary. They were natural, and as yet still uninfluenced about what their naked bodies should look like. Now, not only are we told how our make up should be, what clothes we should wear, we also get told that wrinkles on our stomachs are wrong, stretch marks are wrong, bruises and scars are ugly, pubic hair is bad, fat is bad... well as far as I'm concerned, I am so over it all. I am so over being told that I need to accept that straight men have sexual needs and that i need to make my body ready for that. I'm so sick of watching friends be abused and used by men who have yet to realize that what they are doing is wrong. And yet, if you want to breastfeed in public, that's wrong. If you don't want to wear a bra, you aren't properly dressed. If you don't want to shave, you are lazy. WHAT IS WRONG WITH OUR SOCIETY! SERIOUSLY! WHY DO WE PUT UP WITH THESE DOUBLE STANDARDS??? And that is why I am jealous, because those gorgeous women in the 20's started a revolution, which so many others around me seem to either have forgotten, been brainwashed to think has been won, or are too scared to stand up and say what they think. So this body of work is a glamorous protest. Well, I tried to make it glamorous.