http://shine.yahoo.com/channel/beauty/french-vogue-does-blackface-since-when-is-this-ok-525789/
Aside from being a completely biased article, the issue the writer raises is questionable. To sum it up, French Voque recently put out their October issue which was dedicated to supermodels. In a strange twist of irony, photographer Steven Klein shot but one model, Lara Stone, in a variety of looks and styles. Including make-up that some call blackface. Now, I looked up blackface just to refresh myself, because I honestly could not see why the author of the article kept using this particular phrase. Blackface, to refresh the rest of you, was created to make a mockery of black people. White actors would put on dark face paint and act out racist stereotypes. It became pretty popular and tickled white people considerably, so blackface became used in advertisement as well (Confess it: you've put Aunt Jemima on your waffles at some point, haven't you?).
So, I was trying to understand why the author kept screaming "Blackface blackface blackface!" It'd be one thing if the photographer used several white models and had them all in dark make-up in every shot. However, he only used one girl, and it seems to me that he simply wanted to see how many different looks he could give her. If you go to his website here: http://www.stevenkleinstudio.com/www/index.html you can see every picture of Lara Stone from the October issue. She's certainly not painted dark in every shot. If anything, she goes from dark to white. And there's nothing about any of the photos that seems to suggest negative stereotypes. Or any stereotypes. Fuck, I don't know why he did this shoot, but I really don't see what-all is so offensive about it. And the writer of the aforementioned article doesn't do a very good job of explaining. She's too caught up in being the Great White Hope. "Yeah! I'm a white woman who knows how to scream racism! I can call it, you racist masochistic bastards!"
Someone please, give me your take on this. I'm not sure if I'm making myself clear or if anyone else thinks this woman is a fucking idiot. I mean come on, if you keep looking for ways to be offended, you're bound to become some wound-up dickwad convinced that the entire world is trying to offend you.
Subscribe to:
Post Comments (Atom)
Even if the photographer wasn't being racist (which is probably the case), he really stepped on his own dick here. I don't find the pictures really offensive, but I did headdesk when I saw them.
ReplyDeleteI don't think those pictures are offensive. Top model did something like that but instead of only white-to-black, they changed the ethnicity look (I dunno what else to call it) of every girl, so there was a big range of transformations. I mean, not to say something like, "Anything is okay if Top Model does it", lol, of course not, but nobody complained then, and that's a big-ass corporate show that millions watch. So like what... if 14 girls get makeup put on to look like a different race, people don't start saying, "whiteface" "asianface", "middle eastern face" ect. ect. Seems like this photgrapher just, yeah, wanted to shoot something that changed the girl's appearance a lot, or... something, you know what I mean.
ReplyDelete