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lesovaires · 6 years
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Is this what real beauty looks like?
By Steven McIntosh (Entertainment reporter)
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“Go to Google Images right now,” says photographer Mihaela Noroc, “and search ‘beautiful women’.”
I do as she tells me. Millions of results come back.
“What do you see?” she asks. “Very sexualised images, right?”
Yes. Many of the women in the top pictures are wearing high heels and revealing clothes, and most fit into the same physical mould - young, slim, blonde, perfect skin.
“So beauty all the time is like that,” Mihaela says. “Objectifying women, treating them in a very sexualised way, which is unfortunate.
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“Women are not like that. We have our stories, our struggles, our power, but we just need to be represented, because young women, they see only images like this every day, so they need to have more confidence that they can look the way they look and be considered beautiful.
“But,” she adds, “Google is us, because we are all influencing these images.”
Mihaela has just released her first photography book, Atlas of Beauty, which features 500 of her own portraits of women.
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The Romanian photographer’s definition of beauty, however, appears to be that there is no definition. The women are a variety of ages, professions and backgrounds.
“People are interested in my pictures because they portray people around us, everyday people around the street,” Mihaela explains.
“Usually when we talk about beauty and women, we have this very high, unachievable way of portraying them.
“So my pictures are very natural and simple. And this is, weirdly, a surprise. Because usually we are not seen like that.”
Each of the book’s 500 portraits has a caption with information about where it was taken, and, in many cases, the subject.
The locations are varied, to put it mildly. They include Nepal, Tibet, Ethiopia, Italy, North Korea, Germany, Mexico, India, Afghanistan, the UK, the US, and the Amazon rainforest.
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Some locations, however, proved more problematic than others.
“I approach women I want to photograph on the street. I explain what my project is about. Sometimes I get yes as an answer, sometimes I get no, that really depends on the country I’m in,” she explains.
“When you go to a more conservative society, a woman is going to have a lot of pressure from society to be a certain way, and her day-to-day life is carefully watched by somebody else.
“So she’s not going to accept being photographed very easily, maybe she’s going to need permission from the male part of her family.
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"In other parts of the world they are extremely careful because there might be issues concerning their safety, like in Colombia. Because they had Pablo Escobar and the mafia for so many years.
"So they say ‘OK, so you’re going to take my picture but I’m probably going to be kidnapped after that because you’re part of the mafia and you’re not who you’re saying you are’.”
She adds: “If somebody were to start this project just with men, it would be much easier, because they don’t have to ask permission from their wives, sisters or mothers.”
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Mihaela says she occasionally puts pictures through Photoshop, but not for the reasons you might think.
“When you take a picture, it’s usually raw, and that means it’s very blank, like a painting, you don’t have the colours you had in the reality.
"So I try to make it as vibrant and colourful as it was in the original place. But I’m not making anyone skinnier or anything like that, never, because that’s very painful.
"Because I also suffered as a woman growing up from all kinds of difficulties, I wanted to be skinnier, look a certain way, and that was also related to the fake images I saw in day-to-day life.”
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It’s safe to say Mihaela’s photography book is quite different tonally to, say, Kim Kardashian’s 2015 book of selfies.
“These days, the bloggers, the famous people of our planet have set this unachievable and fake beauty standard, and it’s very difficult for us as women to relate to that,” she says.
“Kim Kardashian has 100 million followers on her Instagram page and I have 200,000, so imagine the difference - it’s astonishing. But slowly, slowly, I think the message of natural and simple beauty will be spread around the world.”
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So what’s the best piece of advice Mihaela could give to anyone keen to get into photography? Buy a good quality camera? Learn about lenses and angles?
Not exactly.
“Buy good shoes,” she laughs, “because you’re going to walk and explore a lot.”
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Link here for the original article
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lesovaires · 8 years
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Best welcome onto 2016 with permanent stay on album of the year and everyone needs to know that!!
Support this fabs not only for their music, but also the education you and your mates need to wake up to.. and since they are bloody great, listen the new EP here and go see them somewhere! 
www.petrolgirls.bandcamp.com
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lesovaires · 9 years
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Happy April 9th 
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Boston declares “Riot Grrrl Day” to honor Kathleen Hanna
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lesovaires · 9 years
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This is a small section from the documentary GRRRL, film directed by Vega Darling and to be released in 2016.
GRRRL: 25 Years of Riot Grrrl is currently in production. An Excerpt from the Forthcoming Feature Documentary, GRRRL is a 10 minute short commissioned for Alien She, the first major art exhibition on riot grrrl. This short was created early in shooting GRRRL and includes interviews with Kathleen Hanna (Bikini Kill, Le Tigre, The Julie Ruin), Erin Smith (Bratmobile, Cold Cold Hearts), Molly Neuman (Bratmobile), Julia Serano, Matt Wobensmith (Outpunk!), Larry-Bob Roberts (Holy Tit Clamps), Stella Zine (Pagan Holiday), Theo Kogan (Lunachicks), Violent Vickie, Anna Joy Springer (Blatz, Cypher in the Snow), Ladyfest Bay Area (2012), Brontez Purnell (Gravy Train!!!!, The Younger Lovers), Kembra Pfahler (The Voluptuous Horror of Karen Black), the Degenerettes, War on Women, Dental Dames, and Shirle Hale (Womyn of Destruction).
Also, couldn't not share this great synopsis :
  Riot grrrl is the female led, feminist and musical culture that propelled third wave feminism into the mainstream. GRRRL explores riot grrrl from the initial spark to modern manifestations, including mass media co-option and cultural impact. Riot grrrl proves the strength of music as a vehicle for social change. GRRRL offers an alternative to the mass media riot grrrl narrative of white middle class college educated exclusivity. GRRRL unfolds the history, global impact and evolution of modern feminism revealing the complexity of identities and experiences within the riot grrrl community of the past and present. This is the story of how grrrls changed the world.
check this project in their website for more news and tons of screening/events where you can watch this excerpt.
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lesovaires · 9 years
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101 WOMEN ARTISTS WHO GOT WIKIPEDIA PAGES THIS WEEK 
The Art+Feminism Wikipedia Edit-a-thon was an international initiative to bring women’s voices to the online encyclopedia—as editors and as subjects 
"Last Saturday, about 600 volunteers in 31 venues around the globe engaged in a collective effort to change the world, one Wikipedia entry at a time.
In the United States, Canada, Australia, Italy, the Netherlands, and the United Kingdom, in nonprofits and art schools, in museums and universities, these people—mostly women—set out to write entries, uncredited and unpaid, for the fast-growing crowd-sourced online encyclopedia.
They had answered a call for the Art+Feminism Wikipedia Edit-a-Thon, a massive multinational effort to correct a persistent bias in Wikipedia, which is disproportionally written by and about men.
Volunteers versed in the process, protocol, andethic of Wikipedia gave tutorials to the newcomers, who were mostly artists, activists, students, and scholars. They learned what constitutes a proper reference, how to create external links, and when and where to put footnotes. They learned that people can’t write about themselves, and what kind of sources are acceptable.
By the end of the day, around 100 new entries were up (around 80 more were enhanced). The new pages, devoted to figures ranging from Australian modernists Ethel Spowers and Dorrit Black to Catalan painter Josefa Texidor i Torres to contemporary artists including Mary Miss, Xaviera Simmons, Audrey Flack, and Monika Bravo, vary widely in scope, grammar, and quality of content. But the Wikipedia team expects that blips will vanish as the hive mind has its work on the entries.
“You have someone you know a lot about? It takes ten minutes,” says Ximena Gallardo C., a gender and film scholar at LaGuardia Community College. “This is the world brain. It’s just starting.”
Read the full piece here
Photo 1: Editors at the resource table during the Wikipedia Art+Feminism Edit-a-thon at Eyebeam in Chelsea (CC BY-SA MICHAEL MANDIBERG)  
Photo 2: Cosima von Bonin, The Bonin / Oswald Empire’s Nothing #04 (The New York Version With Blue Feet), 2011, wool, fabric, MDF, lacquer, CD player, electrical wiring, sound speaker dome, speaker cable. (COURTESY THE ARTIST AND PETZEL, NEW YORK)
Photo 3: Learning to post (CC BY-SA MICHAEL MANDIBERG)
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lesovaires · 9 years
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Shout outs for this and I wish Punch was still a thing. 
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So, the Reading Festival/ Leeds Festival lineup is pretty devoid of women, again. In fact, only 10 acts have any female members at all.
While many people on the internet are saying things like, “There are, and always have been very few good female bands. FULL STOP,” or, “What do you people want, an apology because women can’t do the low roaring vocal which befits most rock music?” - well, that’s just not true, is it?
Here’s what the festival might look, if it contained solely female musicians, or bands which include female members to disprove the silly muso MRAs out there. To suggest that it would be ‘impossible,’ or ‘tokenism,’ to create such an event is ludicrous, especially considering the multitude of talented, interesting and varied artists who are touring and playing today.
Hope you enjoy! Feel free to share smile emoticon
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lesovaires · 9 years
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The Riot Grrrl Manifesto!
2nd Bikini kill zine
1991
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lesovaires · 9 years
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Flyer from Bikini Kill / Huggy Bear show
1992 / 1993
source: unknown
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lesovaires · 9 years
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Bikini Kill in the U.K. 1993 by Lucy Thane
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lesovaires · 9 years
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No Alternative Girls (short film) by Tamra Davis
1993
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Featuring interviews with
Kim Gordon (Sonic Youth and Free Kitten)
Huggy Bear
Kathleen Hanna (Bikini Kill)
Yoshimi P-We (Boredoms and Free Kitten)
Jill Cunniff and Gabby Glaser (Luscious Jackson)
Julie Cafritz (Pussy Galore and Free Kitten)
Courtney Love (Hole)
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